“Just like MatPat, I too have been ruining childhoods since 2011.”
Hi everyone, welcome back to another edition of Dre’s Race Review and Round 5 of the 2025 F1 Championship had the travelling circus had us return to Jeddah’s Corniche circuit and the Saudi Arabian GP. I’m not going to sugarcoat it, the majority of this article is going to be about the first 500 yards, because sadly, it’s become the main character, and not in a fun way either. Let’s get into it.
Game Theory
Max Verstappen gets a poor start from pole position, Oscar Piastri beats him to the inside of Turn 1, makes the apex, runs Verstappen off the road, the latter taking the shortcut to stay ahead. Verstappen doesn’t give the place back, lets the stewards make the call, and gets a 5-second time penalty for his trouble. The time lost in the pits put Oscar Piastri back in front in a race he’d go on to comfortably win by three seconds.
That should be the end of the matter. But it runs so much deeper than that. As I said on Bluesky, my gut says to me, this is a racing incident. Both men knew exactly what they were doing. Piastri barely makes Turn 2 and runs Max four wheels off to the apex. Max cuts the corner but has no grounds to avoid a punishment because he lost the race to the apex, and then keeps the place because he wanted to play Balatro’s Wheel of Fortune and see if he can get away with it. Bad luck, no Polychrome.
Half of you reading this are going for the obvious narrative – That because this is the way Max races, Haha, gotcha! Karmic justice because he was on the other end of it. It runs deeper than that in my opinion, and while Max is the catalyst, he isn’t the problem.
I’ve joked on this website before that the original “Verstappen Amendment” was back in Austria 2019 when he ran Charles Leclerc with four wheels off the track and was allowed to keep the win. It happened again in Austin last year when he turned defence into attack at the apex, forced Norris off and the latter got dinged by keeping position via leaving the track.
Remember, the FIA sat down with the drivers after Austin, and 19 out of the 20 of them wanted the driving standards rule changed, so that if you got to the apex of the corner first, you had the right of way and entitled to racing room, and running someone four wheels off was legal. Now if we’re so sure that Verstappen was the one against that change, whose fault was it? Everyone else, who clearly ganged up and was fed up with Max exploiting what was clearly a poorly written rule. It’s political warfare and classic F1.
I don’t like what this form of racing has become. Turn 1 at Saudi Arabia was a bull rush to the apex to see who had the right of way. That’s not how racing works, and it never used to be that way. My favourite period of F1 racing was when you had to leave a car widths room and the limits of the track were still respected. Fuck, we turned Fernando Alonso’s moaning about that rule being exploited and turned it into a goddamn meme. We slowly phased that shit out and racecraft has been worse as a direct result ever since.
It’s too easy to blame Max Verstappen for it. You can dislike him for it all you want, but he’s the driver more than anyone else in this era that exploits the rulebook like any smart driver would and should do. It’s that same attitude we eventually put Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher on a plinth for, because the history of the sport has shown that those taking those limits were revered and heralded as Gods, even if hindsight says we should have aired more caution.
No one wants to admit it, but deep down we know deep down that we will never have a rulebook for driving standards that is black and white. This sport carries too many human elements in the stewards room, too much gamesmanship and too many variables and mitigating factors. My good friend Sam on Bluesky said it best: “The stewards line is written in jelly”, and every time it moves, it leads us back to having those difficult conversations about said line.
I don’t think George Russell as Drivers representative of the GPDA, or anyone else on the roster needs to interfere with the sporting code like it did last year, we have more than enough competent, former drivers who can do that for us.
The FIA’s Sporting Code says that the onus is on the passing car to do safely, and on the defending car not to move erratically. That’s its core value. No matter what else you do with it, you’ll always have sketchy passes and questionable driving standards that will force you to lean one way or the other.
Now we’ve fiddled with it so much, watching an F1 race, a battle for the win, is a genuinely anxious time because the stewards call can decide a race, like it did today. Is that the racing you want to see?
Don’t blame Max for the rules being the way they are, blame everyone else for wanting to exploit them the same way he did.
And that’s just a theory… a game theory! Thanks for reading! *is dragged off the stage for not being MatPat*
The Lightning Round
And another thing – Turns 1 and 2 at Saudi Arabia are fucking terrible. A track that has a 0.9 mile, 210mph braking zone that leads into a narrow, nasty chicane where running side-by-side is genuinely difficult is shite. It encourages nasty racing to get yourself in front, and it’s another reason this track refuses to produce a good race.
Oh, Lando Norris. A weekend that looked like he was quicker than Piastri through practise, but a crash in Q3 forced him to go from 10th to 4th just to salvage some points. It’s another open goal that’s now had him relinquish the Championship lead, with Piastri’s win now putting the Australian 10 points in front when he was 23 down after Australia. F1’s Ricky Ponting is now favourite for the title and has been almost unflappable since the wet patch in Melbourne. Norris needs a big weekend. And fast.
Red Bull’s outright pace looks like it’s very track dependent. Saudi Arabia is a track where the tyre degradation was virtually zero, Max loves it there, and with it, he was quicker than Piastri for most of the running, with the penalty being the difference maker. What happens when we get a softer tire running in Miami? A shame we didn’t get more of a yardstick because of Yuki Tsunoda being crunched into on Lap 1 by an ambitious outside lunge by Pierre Gasly. A shame.
Charles Leclerc drove the nuts off that Ferrari. 30 laps on the medium tyre to go over the top and hold off Norris on the medium down the stretch. Stunning, stunning drive. He’d be by Driver of the Day but because they now carry Fantasy Points, it’s literally been incentivised to rig it in your drivers favour. A farce on what was already a popularity contest. PS: Hamilton was 30 seconds behind… not ideal.
So, who had Williams fifth in the Constructors after five rounds? Carlos Sainz is starting to get his house in order. They are cookin’.
Gabriel Bortoleto nearly turned his manager into an airplane crash. That was literally the only other highlight of the race.
A couple of genuine, sincere and difficult questions about generally likeable people and things here:
- Is it okay that Sebastian Vettel continues to do a good job of highlighting women in Saudi Arabia as karters while doing so in a country that only let women drive there because the FIA made them do it to bring Formula E there? While likely taking their money and resources to do it?
- Am I the only one who finds the framing of the F1 Academy TV package… off? The F1, 2 and 3 broadcast intros are all about serious poses and looking intimidating, and the F1 Academy’s is all about being smiley and jokey, all while wearing a ton of make-up? I suspect the massive Charlotte Tilbury brand activation (A brand that doesn’t market itself for teenagers at all) is kicking in here, they’re the official makeup partner of the series after all. It irks me because some of the young women in the series are/were by some countries’ definition, underage at 17? (Block, Nobels, Palmowski, etc) Is it okay to think this is off?
I promise I ask these questions in good faith, checking my privilege as a man on the outside looking in, because I look at the F1 Academy in particular here and it makes me uneasy.
The Verdict: 3/10 (Poor) – This race stunk. It was decided via a stewards office for a move that was done after 500 yards, and next to nothing else happened besides it being a drab, Pirelli induced 1-stopper where once again, the medium tyre was the race tyre of choice after the Lap 1 Safety Car cleared. Can the Saudis use all that money and hurry up and finish Qiddiya already? Least it’ll look better on TV. See you in Miami and thank GOD we all get a week off from this nonsense.
