Lewis Hamilton's first pole for Ferrari kicked off a fascinating first sprint weekend of Formula 1 2025 at the Chinese Grand Prix.
From that shock sprint qualifying upset to technical intrigue and a new lap record, here's what we've learned already from round two of the season.
Hamilton's milestone in erratic Ferrari
From the very start of Friday, Hamilton looked a lot more comfortable in his Ferrari than he did at the Australian GP last weekend.
But a sprint race pole position was still a surprise - as was his healthy margin over team-mate Charles Leclerc pretty much all through sprint qualifying.
Hamilton just edged out Max Verstappen and Oscar Piastri on the final runs to score his first Ferrari 'pole', such that it is, and he won't care that McLaren's Lando Norris should have closed out a faster lap. Because Norris didn't.
The erratic nature of this Ferrari was evident in qualifying, as both Hamilton and Leclerc battled big rear snaps in slow-speed corners. At its best the SF-25 looks mighty, but it can fall off just as quickly - as it did in the second part of qualifying when both drivers got caught out on their first runs.
Hamilton always looked the most likely to pull it together. He was confident in the car all day and in qualifying was visibly more proactive on corner entry than Leclerc, attacking the braking zones and hustling the car all the time.
That was perhaps a result of Hamilton's claim he would set the car up a little differently this weekend. He'd followed Ferrari's lead in Australia as Hamilton admitted he'd been chasing knowledge of what to change on the car.
But he said he wanted to start steering things more in China - and whether that's actually the case or not, on-track Hamilton said he'd "started out straight away with a better feeling in the car".
There's been a clear step from Melbourne for both driver and team, most likely down to putting the car in a kinder window that gets more from its tyres.
How McLaren shot itself in the foot
Norris underachieved in qualifying for the sprint, locking up into Turn 14 the hairpin to miss out on what looked a likely pole.
He and team-mate Piastri both looked ragged through the day, but also blindingly quick when they got it right.
This is perhaps a further manifestation of the peaky McLaren's trait to bite back. Right back at testing this was hinted at as a potential McLaren weakness.
A comparison of each team's best sector in Shanghai sprint qualifying is an imperfect analysis, but shows how clear McLaren is when it comes together - almost three tenths from Ferrari and Red Bull.
That hints that McLaren's true potential advantage is about the same as in Melbourne. But after mistakes on their first runs in Q3 last week, both drivers struggled to hook it up in sprint qualifying in China.
Norris said he made too many mistakes in a car that was too difficult to drive. Both drivers tried something different for the final qualifying runs, opting to do two push laps with a cooldown in between.
That didn't pay off, with the other teams instead rewarded for being fuelled slightly lighter and going for broke on a single lap.
Piastri felt Mclaren had done well trying to "tame" the car for qualifying. Still, it seems vulnerable this weekend.
And this seemingly has nothing to do with flexi wings and the FIA's short-notice rule change, because McLaren says it's not changed anything to comply with that, and everything to do with the kind of car McLaren has developed.
Early clues beyond sprint grid
The front row of the grid for the sprint race is a tantalising prospect, with old rivals Hamilton and Verstappen alongside each other.
That gives the sprint a bit of a throwback feel, especially as McLaren has started 2025 as the team to beat.
In reality, that's still the case in China, and not just over one lap.
The nature of a sprint weekend means we are very, very light on representative data after just one practice session.
But what little running was achieved in the condensed FP1 session points to a McLaren edge once again.
All things being equal, McLaren should still be the favourite for the sprint with Piastri obviously in a better position than Norris.
Ferrari didn't do a 'long' run in FP1, not that any team did a real one, so it's hard to judge the gap - but Red Bull looked quite a way off, so Piastri should fancy his chances of picking off Verstappen and Hamilton even in the sprint.
And Mercedes wasn't in the picture at all at the end of qualifying as, though the car seems more user-friendly, it's simply lacking a bit of pace on low fuel and soft tyres. Doing a preparation lap on the mediums seemed effective in SQ2 but that was sacrificed for the shorter SQ3 on softs, and Mercedes also regretted not running slightly later in the session as well.
Extreme contrast at Red Bull
After a nightmare Red Bull debut in Melbourne, Liam Lawson's having an even worse time in China, where he qualified slowest of all for the sprint race after a mistake on his second run.
The end result naturally looks even worse than last week. It does Lawson a slight disservice given his first run in SQ1 indicated a big step from FP1, which had been very disappointing from the get-go after sliding into the gravel exiting Turn 3.
But Lawson can't afford to let moments of progress slip through his fingers with errors like the one that sent him sideways between Turns 9 and 10 on his second run of SQ1, and cost him a place in SQ2. Especially as that 'progress' still had him four tenths adrift of Verstappen on the first runs.
There is a long list of drivers who have learned the hard way how extreme a contrast there can be alongside Verstappen, and so it is again in China for Lawson.
While his early struggles continue, Verstappen's on the front row for the sprint race - and very happy with a good turnaround from a difficult opening practice session.
Edd Straw's trackside standouts
Shanghai is a circuit that puts a premium on achieving a good balance for both fast and slow corners, with time-sapping examples of both awaiting those that can’t achieve that. Turn 3, the long, third-gear left-hander with a downhill entry, is one such corner.
Watching there during free practice and sprint qualifying, it was clear that the McLarens were fast and responsive but also cars that had their moments. Norris, in particular, on his final, aborted, SQ3 lap was skittish in the entry phase, raising question marks about whether the prodigious front-end grip of the car was always matched by the rear.
Ferrari was another interesting case study. As in Bahrain and Melbourne, the car had a tendency to show signs of instability at corner entry, or understeer mid-corner, although as the day progressed Hamilton looked increasingly confident. McLaren's underachievement helped him take sprint pole, but it continued to suggest that the Ferrari is quick, but with a streak of capriciousness.
As for Mercedes, the car continues to look responsive and turns in well. The trouble is, it never really looked searingly fast.
Among the midfielders, Williams and Yuki Tsunoda again looked strong, although Lance Stroll also merits an honourable mention. While Fernando Alonso was often overdriving - multiple times monstering the Turn 3 kerb and sliding off it, which didn't do the car's mid-corner stability any good - Stroll looked serene.
First forced wing change victim
Alpine became the first team to admit on Friday that it has had to make changes to its rear wing following F1's latest 'mini-DRS' clampdown and proceeded to have a terrible day on-track.
While correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation, it's hard not to assume that Alpine's immediately been stung by the change after both drivers were eliminated in the first part of sprint qualifying.
The margins are tight in the midfield, so if Alpine has now sacrificed a little straightline speed - and we know it does not think its engine is very good - that could be making a difference here, with the long back straight. It was the slowest on the straights, but lost a lot more time in low-speed corners.
So far the team's sought to play that down, blaming the double sprint quali Q1 exit on traffic at the start of both drivers' laps.
"The car felt good, it had pace and we just had some traffic at the start of our push lap, which cost us some laptime," Gasly insisted.
"These fine margins can be very costly as has been the case."
A surprise trend is emerging
There are now two competitive qualifying sessions in the books for 2025 - and two proven one-lap aces are lagging behind their new team-mates.
Carlos Sainz continues to lack something against Alex Albon at Williams, which is still in a very tight contest with Racing Bulls to be best of the rest at the start of the year.
While Albon starts the sprint race in the top 10, and with a sniff of a point one place behind Tsunoda, Sainz was a fairly surprising elimination in the second segment on a weaker day than Williams's testing and opening round form would have indicated.
He is still struggling with getting the most out of the soft tyres in the Williams, and tends to be much happier on harder compounds. Williams has seen that from the start in testing, which indicates Sainz is lacking a little bit of trust in what grip the car has.
Sainz reckons it's a combination of three things: his default style is still more tuned to his Ferrari days, he isn't quite on top of all the set-up tools he has at his disposal to help him, and he's just missing a bit of feel on tyre preparation and how each compound reacts.
He also seemed to be perturbed on Friday by a small seat issue, so was perhaps a little uncomfortable too.
Another driver who seems to be in a similar position, at least in terms of one-lap performance, is Nico Hulkenberg.
A renowned qualifying specialist, Hulkenberg has now been beaten in a normal qualifying session and a sprint qualifying session by rookie Sauber team-mate Gabriel Bortoleto.
"It was strange because I think the first lap was kind of alright, but then the second lap, a lot of people found quite a bit of laptime and we didn't," Hulkenberg said after qualifying 19th for the sprint.
"This morning, it looked pretty promising and good but somehow we didn't manage to repeat that."
Glimmer of hope for a car crisis
The 2025 Haas has a flaw so severe the team thought something had to be broken at first in Australia. But a perfectly respectable start in China means there's actually a glimmer of hope here for a team that seemed to be facing a real car crisis.
Haas discovered a chronic problem in high-speed corners in Melbourne, with poor ride quality and aerodynamic inconsistency, that left it the slowest on the grid by a long way.
It's going to take several races before Haas can bring real fixes for that and in the meantime it has to make the most of what it's got.
Opening practice in China was used as a big test session with Haas trialling different set-ups across both cars to work out how to best mitigate its issues here.
And it's already looking a lot better, mainly because the track lacks the kind of fast direction changes that really exposed the car in Melbourne - where Haas was pretty much losing four tenths in a single corner.
Though Esteban Ocon was eliminated in the first segment, with some suspected floor damage, Ollie Bearman will start the China sprint race from 12th on the grid.
"From the first lap in FP1 I knew it would be a bit of a better weekend than what we had in Melbourne," said Bearman.
"I felt comfortable with the car straight away, which is always a nice start to the weekend, and we managed to show a bit of pace out there."
That means Haas looks like it might even be in the mix for points this weekend, just a few days after staring down the barrel of disaster.
New record from transformed track
One new variable in the mix is this is a fully resurfaced Shanghai International Circuit, helping Hamilton set a new lap record in sprint qualifying.
Shanghai has been transformed after its resurfacing. From one of the bumpiest tracks on the calendar, the work undertaken last summer has now made it one of the smoothest.
That characteristic change - which allows cars to be run much lower to the ground for increased downforce - allied to a pretty grippy asphalt has left tyre supplier Pirelli completely taken aback by how much faster things are this year.
As Pirelli's chief engineer Simone Berra said: "Being five seconds faster than FP1 last year and more than two seconds faster than last year's pole position was not expected by us - and not expected by the teams."
Luckily the increase in speeds has not resulted in any excessive fears about wear, but some management of front graining and a bit of thermal degradation is going to be essential in the sprint and main grand prix.
