TYRE ANALYSIS: Pirelli delighted with the performance of its modified intermediate tyres
Following the nail-biting season-opening Australian Grand Prix, F1Technical's senior writer Balazs Szabo analyses the tyre performance and race strategies in the Melbourne race.
Having lived up to the expectations from the Bahrain pre-season testing, McLaren driver Lando Norris won the Australian Grand Prix starting from pole position.
In the majority of the 57-lap race, the Briton found himself in a close fight with his team-mate Oscar Piastri for the victory, albeit a late rain shower lead to a thrilling end. The weather pretty much divided the race into three parts – the first in the wet, the second in the dry and then the final part once more in the wet.
Up until half-distance it looked like McLaren were heading for a dominant one-two finish, but then at one point it seemed the win might escape them, but they still got both drivers home in the points.
Norris took the fifth win of his career and number 190 for the team run by Zak Brown and Andrea Stella, it’s twelfth victory in Australia. Norris could also take pride in taking the second hat-trick of his career, clinching the win, pole position and the fastest race lap.
Reigning world champion Max Verstappen finished second, just 0.895s behind Norris, with Mercedes driver George Russell securing third place, some 8.481s behind.
Pirelli's motorsport director Mario Isola commented: “What a start to the 75th season of Formula 1! In the space of just over a hundred minutes we experienced so many emotions with the result hanging in the balance to the very last lap, not just for the win, but also for the other top ten places."
As for the tyre strategy, all drivers lined up for the formation lap on the intermediates, apart from Lance Stroll who opted for a set of extreme wets on his Aston Martin.
However, Isack Hadjar went off the track so the start was aborted and by the time the race resumed after around ten minutes or so, the Canadian driver had changed to the same rubber as his rivals. For the first seven laps, another Aston Martin was in the lead, but it was the DB9 Safety Car driven by Bernd Maylander, called out immediately following crashes for Jack Doohan and Carlos Sainz.
In between that first restart and a second Safety Car, prompted by Fernando Alonso who hit the barriers in his Aston Martin, all drivers had used the same set of intermediates.
This time, the appearance of the Safety Car triggered a switch to slicks, with the remaining 16 drivers going for either Medium or Hard. However, the rain returned which made it impossible to judge the relative performance of the two compounds, because the entire field, either sooner or later, had to pit again for intermediates, which they then kept to the chequered flag.
“From a purely technical point of view, today we were able to see how the 2025 version of the intermediate performed, proving to be a tyre that allowed the drivers to push flat out and for many laps even on a track where a dry racing line had emerged.
"There was only a little bit of graining on the front left, the tyre that gets the most stress at this track, but in general, we saw that degradation was minimal. There’s not much to say about the slicks because the stints were pretty short, between ten to 14 laps meaning it’s hard to give a complete evaluation of their performance.
“Now, along with the ten teams in the championship, we are preparing for the second round of the season, already next week in Shanghai. It’s a very different track to Melbourne, where we will find a brand-new track surface and at a Sprint weekend, so it’s an extra challenge right from the second race.”
