We rank the Top 10 F1 drivers of 2025
The Race F1 Podcast
The Race Media Ltd
4.5 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 15 December 2025
⏱️ 89 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We work out who were the real stars of the 2025 Formula 1 season in the latest edition of The Race F1 Podcast. Every year, our team of F1 journalists picks their top 10 drivers of the season, with Scott Mitchell-Malm, Mark Hughes and Ben Anderson joining Edd Straw to discuss their choices.
The final top 10 is based on the combined voting of those four, plus Jon Noble, based on each driver’s overall performance relative to machinery over the year.
We explain why the world champion isn’t the obvious choice as number one, why it was so tight in terms of picking between the leading midfielders and how we went about factoring in experience levels. There’s also a look at the leading drivers who missed out on our list, including Ferrari disappointment Lewis Hamilton.
To add another perspective, we also look at how our ranking differs from that voted for by The Race Members’ Club.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Athletic |
| 0:02.7 | The Races |
| 0:02.7 | The race is on, and with the dust settled on the 20205 World Championship, who were |
| 0:16.5 | really the best 10 performers in Formula One? |
| 0:18.9 | We look beyond the points table to formulate our ranking, |
| 0:21.5 | but who made the cut and who missed out? |
| 0:24.1 | I'm Ed's draw and joining me to discuss the top drivers of the season |
| 0:26.8 | are Ben Anderson, Scott Mitchell Mell and Mark Hughes. |
| 0:31.0 | Well, Mark, this is always a fun challenge, isn't it? |
| 0:33.6 | Coming up with the top 10 drivers of the season, |
| 0:36.4 | I don't know about you, but I found this one of the more challenging years. |
| 0:40.5 | Yes, I think it was probably very, very close around the cutoff, wasn't it? |
| 0:46.4 | I think maybe the top six, seven drivers sort of chose themselves |
| 0:52.0 | and left it to us to put them in the right order. |
| 0:55.4 | And then after that was probably about seven or eight that you could say you could make a case for |
| 1:01.4 | to put it in the top ten. And obviously we don't have enough slots left. So yeah, it was quite tricky. |
| 1:08.3 | Yeah, it says a lot about how good the depth of driver quality is in Formula One that there's |
| 1:11.2 | drivers, because we ranked everyone. There is a separate video with all of that, and there's drivers |
| 1:14.6 | down in sort of 15th, 16th, 17th place who actually had pretty good season. So it tells you how difficult is. How about you, Ben? You've been doing this for quite a while on and off. And did you have a similar kind of experience? |
| 1:24.3 | Yeah, similar to Mark. |
| 1:26.0 | I found, as ever, the sort of 10th place was really the crapshoot of this one. |
| 1:30.7 | They were, I think... experience? Yeah, similar, similar to Mark. I found, as ever, the sort of 10th place was really |
... |
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