2025 Formula 1 Spanish Grand Prix Highlights

A late-race 10-second penalty demoted Oracle Red Bull Racing’s Max Verstappen out of the podium fight down to 10th in the 2025 Formula 1 Spanish Grand Prix.

Verstappen had been in the hunt for at least a podium finish for the majority of the Grand Prix. However, a late Safety Car deployment forced the Dutchman to pit for hard tyres, and his RB21 lost almost all grip. This caused him to run off track twice in the space of two corners, losing third place to Charles Leclerc and then making contact with George Russell of Mercedes. This earned him a 10-second penalty, dropping him to 10th in the final race results. Verstappen’s Oracle Red Bull Racing team-mate Yuki Tsunoda had a hard race after starting from the pit lane and could advance no further than 13th at the finish.

Max Verstappen, Driver, Red Bull Racing

It was unfortunate that the Safety Car came out, and we were unlucky to have to pit. That’s racing, though. Sometimes it works for you, and sometimes it doesn’t. The only fresh tyres that we had at the end were hards, so we made the call to change to these when everyone was on softs. Unfortunately, the hard tyres have very low grip, which was quite frustrating and made things a lot more difficult. We only had six laps so that the others could go flat out, and we struggled quite a bit. There, of course, was an opportunity to stay out on the soft tyre, but that was a call we made, and it is easy to look back in hindsight. When we entered the restart, we found ourselves in a tricky situation and relinquished the place. What happened happened, and we received a 10-second penalty. In the race, we maximised what we had, did everything we could and didn’t quite have the pace to match the McLarens. Ultimately, we have to take the positives from today. There are always things that can be improved, and we know that the three-stop was the right way to go, especially with the tyre degradation.

Yuki Tsunoda, Driver, Red Bull Racing

Until the Safety Car was deployed today, there was potential to score points. This weekend was not what we wanted, but it is what it is. It’s been up and down this week, but our pace was alright today. A pit-lane start is never ideal, but we knew we would need to try something different for the race today to try and make up some ground. We were experimenting with various configurations of the setup. It didn’t do much in the end today, but we have an idea of how to improve this in Canada. We are not where we want to be, but we will continue to work as a team and strive to remain consistent throughout the weekend.

CHRISTIAN HORNER, CEO and Team Principal

From the way the race was panning out, we elected to take a three-stop approach and committed to it pretty early on. The pace advantage and the tyre advantage that the McLarens had in a straight fight meant that we took the gamble. We took the first stop early on, and McLaren committed to a two-stop strategy. Our approach was looking like it was on track to be the quickest. We went for the potential undercut with Max, but he then used all of his soft and medium compounds. The Safety Car came out at the worst possible time for our strategy, and we had to decide between staying out on older tyres and being exposed at the restart or taking the gamble with the new set of hard tyres. Hindsight is always 20/20, but we made the best decision at the time, given the information available to us at the time. There was then contact with George that the stewards deemed an incident, resulting in a penalty. It’s something we will discuss internally and look at further. It’s a frustrating result, as it looked like it would be an easy podium for Max today. The Safety Car hurt Yuki’s race today; he would have been very close to the points. Otherwise, if you look at the trajectory, he was on pace and had a tyre advantage; he would have been in the points. It was a tough weekend; the results weren’t what he wanted, but he will be busy working with the team over the next week to make some setup improvements for Montreal.

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