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Hello and a very warm welcome to the late-breaking F-1 podcast presented by Harry Ead, Sam Sage, and me, Ben Hocking.

We are back for a very exciting episode. I love this sort of four-day stretch that we have in December of every season because we have possibly one of the more

serious episodes we do in a year, followed by one of the most stupid episodes, not actually

the most stupid episode we do all year. The LB Awards are coming on Wednesday, Sam, but before we

get there, we are going to go through the entire 2025 championship today and review it.

Yeah, the issue with the Lbe Awards being after this one,

it's like, remember when you were a kid and you had the Christmas break coming up, but you had to do like your mocks or something like that before, and you're like, I'm not concentrating on the mocks. I've got the Christmas break coming up in a week, and that is literally what's happening right now. I've got this train on the Elbe. So all 24 races apparently, here we go.

You're going to get like a races, apparently, here we go.

It's not you're going to get like a C, a D and an E.

That's classic.

That sounds about right, actually.

It's now officially a week, and I'm still in Ben's house.

I have not left.

But we have sought chairs again.

I walked in. I was like, Ben, I swear to go, man. And he said he purposely swapped them this way around again. Yeah, it's about time you leave, to be honest. I'll think about it. But I'll probably still hear for the LPs. I'm going to keep switching these chairs around it to you leave. Well, that's going to be interesting because we're recording the LBs on the same night. They're going to switch around now. I can't wait for the next time to be that Ben is sat on Harry in the chair to sat in each other. Oh, this is what the people are tuning in for, but just in case there's someone out there that wants some F1 chat, let's crack on. We're going to go through all 24 races. Obviously, we're not

going to spend an hour on each one. It's not going to be a 24-hour podcast. We're going to stick to our

usual length, but we're going to skip through some of them that maybe there aren't too many things to talk about and then we'll spend a bit more time on those that gave us plenty of talking points. But we are going to go through chronologically. So let's go to the start of the season. Before we even get to Australia, Sam, we see the 2024 championship we have, Max Verstappen, take the driver's championship, but McLaren take the

Constructors' Championship. And a lot of Verstappen's success came from such a dominant start

for Red Bull. It looked like as a result of preseason testing going into Australia, that

probably wasn't going to repeat itself. No, but we were going into the new season with a

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