Aside from some opening-lap pinball, the Las Vegas Grand Prix had looked pretty straightforward through its duration - but McLaren's stunning double disqualification means that's not how it'll go into the history books.
Here are our winners and losers from a dramatic evening in Nevada.
Winner - Max Verstappen (1st)
Win number six of 2025 for Max Verstappen appeared to be one of the most straightforward as Norris’s mistake gave Verstappen the lead on the opening lap and George Russell’s early-race pressure soon faded away.
And things got even better for Verstappen post-race with the aforementioned news of McLaren’s double disqualification - a huge boost for his outsider F1 title hopes.
The DSQs moved him from 42 points to 24 points adrift of Norris with two weekends remaining.
Verstappen winning championship number five remains a long shot, but the odds are a lot shorter than they looked pre-weekend or even immediately after the chequered flag. - Josh Suttill
Loser - McLaren (DSQ & DSQ)
From a sporting standpoint, depending on how the final two rounds play out, this could end up one of the worst weekends in McLaren's F1 history.
Assuming the team doesn't care about which of its two drivers brings home the crown - and there really is very little evidence to the contrary, but do argue about it if you want - the Vegas result looked acceptable at the flag, with Verstappen left with minimal room for manoeuvring despite his commanding victory.
Now he looms as a terrifying threat - and the championship context is such that McLaren may yet end up in the uncomfortable situation of balancing Piastri's fading title aspirations against ensuring Verstappen doesn't snatch the crown, and thus having to take a difficult decision in favour of one of its two drivers.
It was looking a little too simple. We should have known. - Val Khorounzhiy
Winner - Kimi Antonelli (3rd)
Something strange, potentially steering wheel-related, was going on with Russell's pace, so there's the tiniest of asterisks against Antonelli's performance as a display of his ultimate pace potential.
But pace potential isn't the question with Antonelli. What matters is that, after the initial start infringement, he drove like a seasoned veteran here, managing the hards over a 48-lap stint, shutting the door on Piastri, then stretching his legs to put Charles Leclerc out of the five-second penalty range.
It was just not very rookie-like at all - and exactly what Mercedes and Antonelli should've hoped to see at the end of a gruelling first season. - VK
Loser - Gabriel Bortoleto (DNF)
Bortoleto’s otherwise impressive rookie season has gone off the boil these past two races. After that frightening smash in the Brazil sprint and then a first-lap collision with Lance Stroll’s Aston Martin, Bortoleto found his way into another collision with Stroll - only this time wiping the Aston Martin clean out of the race at Turn 1.
Bortoleto thinks if he’d braked “five metres earlier I would've probably stopped the car”, but that seems a bit optimistic considering the high velocity with which his Sauber entered the scene. It looked more like he was racing on a sim with damage turned off than entering the first lap of a real-life grand prix.
To his credit, Bortoleto held his hands up, said he would apologise to Stroll and agreed “I need to pay for my mistakes” - which he will do by taking a five-place grid penalty for the next race in Qatar.
Unlike some other drivers, Bortoleto clearly carries some reputational credit on the grid, too - because Stroll, despite being torpedoed out of the race, called him “a good kid” who “didn't do it on purpose".
"It's cold conditions, it can happen to anybody," added Stroll, clearly in one of his more philosophical post-race moods. - Ben Anderson
Loser - Ferrari (4th & 8th)
It might have looked on the face of things like a decent damage limitation race for Ferrari, after a very poor Saturday for both drivers, but the fact both were so downbeat despite gaining ground in the race tells the real story.
Charles Leclerc called this “probably the best race of the season in terms of personal performance” but felt the outcome was both “disappointing” and “frustrating”.
Even though at that time he didn’t know sixth would become fourth thanks to both McLarens being excluded, that makes no odds really in terms of Ferrari losing yet more ground in the race for second in constructors’ championship.
Hamilton was back on one of his increasingly familiar misery trips, calling this his “worst season ever” - which is statically correct - and sounding more hopeless than ever in terms of finding a solution. “No matter how much I try it keeps getting worse”.
Hamilton normally enjoys a ‘burn from the stern’ but it seems nothing can make him feel better about this miserable first year in Ferrari red. - BA
Winner - Carlos Sainz (5th)
A bit like Baku, this was one of those weekends where the order was scrambled and Sainz showed his class by bagging the best result possible for Williams.
Qualifying third in a really difficult wet session on Saturday was one thing, and Sainz always expected to go backwards considering he started ahead of a Ferrari and a McLaren, but to finish only four seconds behind Leclerc and 10s clear of the next midfield car (Isack Hadjar’s Racing Bulls) was about as good as it gets for Williams at this stage of the season. - BA
Loser - Alex Albon (DNF)
Las Vegas was more like a game of pinball than a grand prix for Albon, who followed up his disappointing wall-striking Q1 exit on Saturday with a race that featured separate collisions at Turn 1 (trying to avoid the Bortoleto missile) and with Hamilton’s Ferrari later on.
Radio failure before the start doubtless didn’t help, but this is another of those weekends where Albon feels the underlying pace is there but hasn't been realised on his side of the Williams garage.
It’s been a long time - probably all the way back to Monza in September - since he enjoyed a clean weekend and fully maximised whatever the Williams was capable of. - BA
Loser - Yuki Tsunoda (12th)
The only case for Yuki Tsunoda not being in this list is that it was a fairly standard Tsunoda drive. He didn’t make much progress from the pitlane, only rising to 12th in a race with three retirements and two disqualifications, his first consecutive finish outside the points.
But Tsunoda ending up just short of 97s off his race winning team-mate Verstappen was particularly limp, especially when Tsunoda might only have two more weekends in Red Bull, or in F1 full stop. - JS
Loser - Pierre Gasly (13th)
Alpine's 'could've been an email' F1 season continued in style in Vegas. With its latest non-score, the team now has a very real chance of guaranteeing last place in the constructors' with a round to spare - which, as far as I can tell, has never ever happened in the history of F1.
Gasly had qualified well here after a promising weekend but got half a corner into the race before all his hopes and dreams were dashed as a consequence of Bortoleto's spectacular blunder.
As Gasly himself wonderfully put it, it had been a "long f***ing flight [to Vegas] to end up spun around" with a smashed-up diffuser. "Honestly, I’d like to tell you more things [but] it’s just been a pretty s**t day." - VK
Winner - Nico Hulkenberg (7th)
Hulkenberg had a Ferrari breathing down his diffuser at the end of his first stint, and yet keeping ahead of that Ferrari proved shockingly comfortable - and paid off extra when the two McLarens were thrown out.
It was probably the best available result, and it leaves Sauber's two constructors' rivals - Haas and Aston Martin - a lot more in range for the team in its final non-Audi season. - VK
Sauber in the constructors' standings
6 Racing Bulls 90
7 Haas 73
8 Aston Martin 72
9 Sauber 68
10 Alpine 22
Loser - Aston Martin (11th & DNF)
Stroll was removed from the race immediately by Bortoleto, but, as mentioned above, was pretty gracious about it - potentially also because he could see that not much at all was on offer for Aston in dry conditions here.
Fernando Alonso nursed opening-lap damage through the race but said the team hadn't clocked any "aero performance change". Ultimately, the pace just wasn't there to be extracted. - VK
Loser - Liam Lawson (14th)
Liam Lawson was quite fortunate to not wipe out Piastri with his wheel-banging mistake into Turn 1 nor pick up a penalty for such an obvious error.
The stewards found Lawson moving to avoid colliding with the rear of Russell’s locked-up Mercedes as good enough mitigation along with it being an opening-lap matter to write it off as a racing incident - again, a somewhat fortunate outcome for Lawson.
But he did receive race-wrecking damage from that incident that set him up for a lonely race to finish a lap down in 14th place. - JS
