Lando Norris snubbed as Martin Brundle reveals his F1 driver of 2025

Martin Brundle has picked F1 championship runner-up Max Verstappen as his driver of the 2025 season.

Verstappen missed out on winning a fifth consecutive world championship by just two points to McLaren’s Lando Norris, who clinched his maiden drivers’ crown by finishing third at the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

Red Bull’s Verstappen won more races than any other driver in 2025 (eight) and claimed the same amount of pole positions, despite having an inferior car to McLaren for most of the campaign.

A stunning turnaround after the summer break saw Verstappen reduce what had been a 104-point deficit down to just two points in nine races as he came agonisingly close to becoming a five-time world champion.

And it was the Dutchman who impressed Sky Sports F1’s Brundle the most.

“That would be Max [Verstappen],” Brundle said at a MotorSport event. “Lando did a super job. He got really strong in the head, drove beautifully.

“Some of the races that he won, he absolutely dominated in a style I’ve seen very few drivers do in the 40 years I’ve been around F1.

“But you’d have to say Max is still the best driver on the grid.”

Plenty of praise for Norris too

Writing in his final post-race column for Sky Sports F1, Brundle heaped plenty of praise on Norris for the way he dealt with his own setbacks throughout the year.

“Congratulations to Lando Norris on becoming Formula 1 world champion after a fine, but sometimes intense and challenging, 24 races. His victories in Melbourne, Monaco, Austria, Silverstone, Hungary, Mexico, and Brazil, with a total of 18 trips to the podium, were the highlights,” Brundle wrote.

“The low moments would be crashing into his team-mate Oscar Piastri in Canada with a clumsy move, a retirement in Zandvoort with oil issues, failing to take advantage of Piastri's nightmare weekend in Baku with a lowly seventh, technical disqualification in Las Vegas, and a poor strategy call by the team in Qatar limiting him to fourth. It was a rollercoaster season to say the least.

“To handle all that, Lando made a big step forward in mind management this season, and he began to regularly convert pole position into the lead at the end of the first lap, a good example of which was Mexico's enormous run down to the first corner whilst slipstreaming the whole pack behind from pole position. He placed his car extremely well, narrowly ahead in a four-wide pack, then braked in the right place by just the right amount, claimed the first chicane cleanly and then simply dominated the race with ease.

“He handled pressure situations much better, whether it was in qualifying, racing, or indeed out of the car. He gradually stopped being so publicly hard on himself which was only feeding his rivals. But he still stayed true to who he is and how he wants to behave in racing and learned to diffuse those moments when he wanted to berate himself to the world.

“His racecraft has always been good and that was ramped up this year with more incisive overtakes and defending, and tyre management such as his Pirelli whispering victory in Budapest, much to Piastri's chagrin.”