These are the big winners and losers from the Australian Grand Prix

The big winner after the Australian Grand Prix is of course Mercedes. The team had already prepared for the victory, as the whole team was quickly seen wearing shirts with “P1” on the chest. The fact that it turned into a 1-2 after a far-from-flawless start says enough about how strong Mercedes is at the moment.

Due to the weak start, the opening of the race initially looked evenly matched, but once the Mercedes drivers got into clean air, there was no stopping them. Without George Russell and Kimi Antonelli being truly pushed, they effortlessly pulled away from the rest of the field. The competition fears what this means for the rest of the F1 season.

Unsurprisingly, Oscar Piastri is the biggest loser of the weekend. On the grid, you could hear a shocked scream from the crowd. The screens showed an orange car flying into the wall, after which the broadcast cut to a commercial. Was it Lando Norris or was it “their” Oscar Piastri?

It turned out to be the Australian. The commercial was cut short and the feed switched to footage of Piastri. He himself was fine, but his car was in pieces. His Grand Prix was over before it started, and that after a crash on the lap to the grid.

Piastri partly blamed himself. Cold tires and running onto the exit kerb. However, it wasn’t entirely his fault, as the McLaren driver judged. In that corner he also unexpectedly received 100 kilowatts of extra energy compared to what he’d had at any point during the weekend. There was no saving it.

Arvid Lindblad had a dream debut for Racing Bulls. The Brit made Q3 in qualifying and was faster than Liam Lawson every time up until that session. It only went wrong in Q3 when Lindblad’s battery wouldn’t deploy.

In the race, however, the rookie drove to an impressive eighth place and points on his debut. After a blistering start he even ran third for a while and stood out with some hard defending.

Max Verstappen was less enamored with Lindblad. According to Verstappen, the Brit brake-tested him when entering the pit lane. The Dutchman made it abundantly clear over the team radio what he thought of his Red Bull colleague.

Alpine wrote off all of 2025 to be successful in 2026. Pierre Gasly even said in 2025 that he would be in contention for the world title in 2026. In that regard, Alpine has had a rude awakening. Where the performance still seemed fine in Bahrain, Alpine slipped behind Racing Bulls, Haas, and even the new team with a brand-new engine, Audi.

The disappointment was written all over the faces of Franco Colapinto and especially Pierre Gasly. All through 2025 the motto was “we’re doing everything for 2026,” but the gap to the top four is enormous, and compared to the midfield rivals, Alpine hasn’t taken that big a step forward either.

The other side of the coin is the pride that will prevail at Audi. It’s not all perfect yet, as evidenced by Gabriel Bortoleto’s problems at the end of Q2 and the DNS for Nico Hulkenberg. However, when the Audi with its brand-new engine keeps running, it’s seriously competitive.

On Audi’s F1 debut, points were scored immediately by Gabriel Bortoleto. The talented Brazilian finished ninth and was in the mix with the best midfield teams, Racing Bulls and Haas. A performance they are rightly very proud of at Audi.

Like Alpine, Williams had also set its sights on 2026. In 2025, with an old car, they still surprisingly secured fifth in the constructors’, but in 2026 Williams has taken a big step back instead of forward.

Points never seemed within reach for Alexander Albon and Carlos Sainz. Both also suffered plenty of issues throughout the weekend. James Vowles in particular has his doubts about the engine and why Mercedes is able to extract so much more from it themselves. The team will, however, also have to take a hard look at their car.

Among the Mercedes customers, Williams has clearly come out as the worst. It’s not far behind Alpine, but McLaren and especially Mercedes are lightyears ahead. For a team that stated ambitions to win races and championships, the road to that goal looks a bit longer than hoped.

This could have been a disastrous weekend for Kimi Antonelli, but excellent work from his team still made him a winner. The huge crash in qualifying could have put the Italian immediately on the back foot in the championship, but in the end, after a difficult weekend, he still finished second.

As a result, the damage has been limited, and Antonelli can now prepare for a title fight with Russell. That won’t be easy, but with Mercedes as the clearly strongest team, the question is whether any other teams will even be able to get between the two silver cars.

That Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll failed to finish the Australian GP surprised no one. They may have even lasted longer than expected. Still, it was a disastrous weekend for Aston Martin and Honda, with the communication, to put it mildly, being particularly remarkable.

With Adrian Newey as spokesperson, Aston Martin clearly threw Honda under the bus, and given how things went between Honda and McLaren ten years ago, you wonder how that was received in Japan. Even before the race had been run, Honda was already under the bus. Hardly an ideal start for a still fledgling relationship.

Red Bull was already the surprise of winter testing and did not disappoint during the Australian Grand Prix. As with Audi, things at Red Bull are not yet running flawlessly. Max Verstappen’s crash in qualifying and Isack Hadjar’s retirement in the Grand Prix indicate there is still plenty of work to be done in terms of reliability.

However, they can be satisfied with the performance. With a first-ever engine built in-house by Red Bull Powertrains and Ford, they are immediately the third/fourth-best team. Mercedes and Ferrari are clearly a step too far, especially in the race, but Red Bull seems perfectly capable of matching McLaren.

A title fight seems a bit too much to ask in the first season, but the fact that Red Bull is immediately in the mix says a lot about the quality in Milton Keynes. The fact that Racing Bulls can also fight at the front of the midfield says a lot about the strength of the engine. It’s a good starting point for both teams, from which they will need to find a path upward in the development race with other teams.