A McLaren 1-2 that nearly wasn't, a brutal Ferrari disillusionment after the joy of the sprint, and more major swings in the midfield made even more major by shocks from post-race scrutineering.
It's still so early in the season but the Chinese GP has felt significant for how we expect 2025 to play out.
Here are our winners and losers from Sunday's race.
Winner - Oscar Piastri
Oscar Piastri's third grand prix victory might just be the bedrock of his first championship challenge if he’s able to repeat these kinds of weekends.
Piastri had the edge on Lando Norris all weekend long, unusually on one-lap pace (his 2024 downfall) as well as race pace.
It’s the perfect bounceback from his Melbourne Sunday disaster - where otherwise he was neck-and-neck with Norris - and some great vindication for McLaren locking him down pre-season. - Josh Suttill
Loser - Ferrari
The high of Lewis Hamilton's sprint win remains an early and significant proof-of-concept for the blockbuster signing - but the good vibes from it have been well and truly dashed.
I don't want to judge Ferrari's actual Sunday performance too harshly, as it had been clearly flattered a bit by McLaren's failure to execute through the sprint part of the weekend. But it will have been galling to lose out to a Mercedes and a Red Bull and to have to order a position swap between its two cars in favour of the damaged one.
Read: Why Ferrari got its double DSQ + the impact
That's not really a sign of a package working optimally, is it? And even if it was just a reflection of Charles Leclerc suddenly having much more baseline pace than Hamilton on Sunday due to some ill-conceived set-up tweaks for the latter - well, that too is a telltale indicator of a particularly finicky car, no?
All that, though, will fade into obscurity when placed alongside the genuinely spectacular achievement of having both of your cars disqualified for entirely different infringements (Leclerc's car underweight, Hamilton's with excessive plank wear) and have no mitigating circumstances for either of them. - Valentin Khorounzhiy
Loser - Alpine
Pierre Gasly's post-race disqualification adds to what has been a really weird start to the season for Alpine.
The car looks a bit erratic - especially after the wing change it's had to implement due to a new FIA technical directive - but good enough to be confidently assessed as not the worst car on the grid.
Yet Alpine is now the only team yet to score in 2025 - and while you'd fancy its chances of overhauling, say, Sauber reasonably soon, it really can't be giving its front-of-midfield rivals a head start like this. - VK
Winner - Max Verstappen
Another masterclass in damage limitation from Max Verstappen in what looked like the fourth fastest car this weekend, certainly on high fuel.
He let the race come to him, not overpushing when he didn’t have the pace of those ahead of him early on.
And when Lewis Hamilton pit and Charles Leclerc’s front tyres cried enough, Verstappen swooped from sixth to fourth in style around the outside of the sweeping opening turns.
He clearly doesn’t have the car to challenge for the title right now but he’s still doing the damage limitation he needs to should Red Bull sort itself out.
As Verstappen himself put it when told he'd outscored Norris during the weekend: "Is that so? I think it is [positive], if you look at it like that! If you look at our pace compared to the rest." - JS
Loser - Fernando Alonso
A brake problem a few laps into the race means Fernando Alonso has failed to finish the first two races of an F1 season for the first time since the final year of McLaren-Honda. The various post-race news have now made it pretty clear he should've scored decently had he just stayed in the race.
There's an argument that Aston Martin underperformed with Lance Stroll, too. He was, after all, running seventh after a mammoth opening stint, running at a similar pace to those behind him despite being on older rubber.
Unfortunately the majority of those behind him - perhaps on evidence of that very Stroll stint - had switched from what initially appeared to be a two-stop to a one-stop strategy, and Stroll wasn't able to capitalise in the same way as Ollie Bearman in the Haas (whose team seemed to get the timing of the stop just right while Aston left Stroll's too late).
The post-race disqualifications help sweeten the blow there as Stroll moves into ninth place. And the other positive Aston Martin can take is Stroll’s own relatively strong start to the season - sixth in Melbourne and 2-1 up on Alonso in qualifying. - JS
Winner - Haas
After a nightmare Australian Grand Prix, where the car was so far off the pace the team thought it might be broken, Haas went back to being the credible, upper midfield points contender in China we all know it to be - and was rewarded for it further by some post-race luck.
That doesn’t mean the underlying problems of aerodynamic inconsistency related to ride height sensitivity aren’t still there, it just means the new, super smooth Shanghai track surface allowed Haas to run its new car in a much better set-up window than was available on the bumpier, street-style surface of Melbourne.
Hence we saw Esteban Ocon have a very strong race to what is now fifth - best of the rest and picking off the apparently floor damage-hobbled Mercedes of rookie Kimi Antonelli - and Bearman claw his way into the top 10 even before the disqualifications to give Haas a double points finish.
It looks on the surface like a remarkable turnaround, but questions over how repeatable this result is will remain given how sensitive that car’s aero map seems to be. - Ben Anderson
Loser - Liam Lawson
Finding positives in Lawson's start to life as a Red Bull driver has been a real clutching-at-straws exercise, and today even those straws were nowhere to be found.
The Red Bull RB21 looked unimpressive all throughout the Chinese GP, only showing a brief flicker of life in the final laps of Verstappen's race, but you have the feeling it's still at least a good enough car to clear the dregs of the midfield.
Read: Lawson's seat is at immediate risk - what you need to know
Lawson did that in the sprint but looked nowhere near pulling it off in the race. Christian Horner's post-race hint that Lawson's race may have been sacrificed to "radical changes" on the set-up for the benefit of car development may give him some grace - but the rest of Horner's comments suggest Red Bull is very, very close to deciding it's already seen enough. - VK
Winner - Alex Albon
Williams might be underperforming slightly relative to pre-season expectations of the FW47, but Albon's stock is rising with every session that team-mate Carlos Sainz can't get on terms with him.
Sainz says he has struggled with Q1-Q2-Q3 laptime progression with the car so far, but it's clearly not the only limitation - it's just very hard to believe that he had an Albon-like race in him today.
And while there's nothing new in Albon executing well in a strategy-improvisational race, it sure looks a lot better on the CV when you can compare it to not Nicholas Latifi or Logan Sargeant in the other car but a four-time grand prix winner. - VK
Loser - Racing Bulls
Yuki Tsunoda's sprint race result at least kept this weekend from being a total write-off for Racing Bulls, but it certainly feels like the team is losing points hand over fist.
It's plausible the car wasn't quite as good as it looked in qualifying - and certainly that was Tsunoda's interpretation. But the team's two-stop strategies (hard-medium-hard and hard-hard-medium) clearly didn't help, and left it racing for nothing already (or so it thought at the time) by the time Tsunoda's front wing failed.
It was a bad day made worse by its midfield rivals raking in the extra points afforded by the post-race disqualifications. The Bulls should've at least been close enough to benefit. - VK
Winner - George Russell
George Russell finished one place behind where he started - and was passed twice by Norris along the way - but he has to be classified as a winner given the scale of McLaren’s advantage.
Third was always going to be the best Russell could hope for unless Norris’s brake problem got even worse. His main rivals were the Ferraris and Verstappen and Russell beat them all to claim his second consecutive podium.
Russell has also had a decisive advantage over new team-mate Antonelli across the first two weekends, starving off any of the intra-team heat (for now) that a driver of Antonelli’s raw capability can bring.
His level versus Hamilton in 2024 always suggested he would do so - but, yes, Russell is stepping up to the role of Mercedes team leader with ease this year. - JS
Loser - Sauber
Sauber was an unlikely points scorer in Australia, but beyond that headline result appears to have developed a 2025 car that is a credible midfield threat. Gabriel Bortoleto made Q2 in Melbourne and Nico Hulkenberg was 12th on the grid in China, suggesting there’s some fundamental pace in that car.
But the Chinese Grand Prix itself was a disaster for Sauber. Hulkenberg lost control “very aggressively” exiting Turn 3 on the first lap and says the subsequent bounce through the gravel trap damaged the car and cost him downforce, hence his nothing race to 15th.
Team-mate Bortoleto’s race to 14th, just shy of 10s up the road, was a similar story - an off on lap one fighting with Bearman’s Haas that forced an early pitstop to change damaged tyres, so thereafter this was little more than a test session for him.
Hulkenberg didn’t completely rubbish the suggestion the Sauber might be particularly ‘peaky’ and susceptible to aero stalls running behind other cars, but also feels it’s far too early to make such judgements with one rookie driver and another still learning an unfamiliar team and car.
For now, let’s put this one down to two unfortunate driver errors. - BA
