It’s rare for a Formula 1 race in 2025 to have it all: The lead to the championship swapped between teammates, a second-place battle to the checkered flag, a defensive masterclass only Checo Perez could pull off, a last-lap virtual safety car, a harsh penalty, and even harsher pushes off the track.
The 2025 Mexico City Grand Prix delivered all of the above on Sunday. However, it was a collection of drives from midfield teams—rivaling those with speedier cars and bigger bottom lines—that stole the show spanning 71 laps.
When Oliver Bearman made his F1 debut in the 2024 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix in place of Carlos Sainz, no one would have guessed the Formula 2 driver would drag a Ferrari up to seventh place during his first-ever 50-lap F1 race. To cross the finish line driving the prancing horse logo as a first-timer was an impressive feat, but scoring in the top five around Mexico City’s Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez after going wheel-to-wheel with four-time champ Max Verstappen in a Haas was almost supernatural.
Bearman finished in fourth place, just shy of a podium finish, after starting from ninth on the grid to claim the team’s best-ever result. The 20-year-old, fittingly, won the Driver of the Day award.
“We finished there on merit,” Bearman said post-race. “Even if we didn’t have the pace to qualify there, we had the race pace to stay there. So I think we did an excellent job… It’s a feel-good moment. Also, to go side-by-side with Max [Verstappen] is a very cool feeling. He’s someone I have basically grown up watching in F1, so it’s awesome and I’m really proud of the job we did today.”
With Esteban Ocon’s ninth-place result, the American team also secured its highest joint finish. Ocon finished just behind Lewis Hamilton, who started in third and was hit with a 10-second time penalty for leaving the track and gaining an advantage, and tangoed on track with the Williams of Alex Albon and the Sauber of Gabriel Bortoleto to take home two points.
Just scraping by into the points, Bortoleto completed the top 10, carrying the team that will soon morph into Audi F1 after Nico Hulkenberg retired due to a mechanical issue.
While Mercedes may not be a traditional mid-field team, they are the best of the rest. Kimi Antonelli and George Russell’s ability to keep former championship leader Oscar Piastri at bay—until they couldn’t—was one of those moments where driver strategy outweighed the speed of their car.
But the handful of mid-tier clashes that made Sunday’s grand prix one to remember meant something more than the points each team took home.
In any era of dominance—whether Hamilton’s or Verstappen’s or the current McLaren age of mastery—24 races a year can get dull, especially when we near the end of a long season. Even with the excitement that a title fight between two teammates brings, a little scrappiness and variety can help revive the magic of racing into a sport that is continuously changing with entertainment and America in mind.
F1 is already set on boosting viewership. It drew its best-ever U.S. GP audience last weekend, with 1.5 million viewers, according to ESPN. The Miami GP in May drew 2.1 million spectators, too. The sport, with innovation in its blood, is looking to inflate those numbers, and it is pushing toward a future that seems to prioritize artificial showmanship over improving the racing product. CEO Stefano Domenicali proposed shorter races to capture the ever-shrinking attention spans of young spectators. Races in glitzy host cities willing to pay trump the drivers’ ability to overtake on those circuits. Traditional, fan-favorite tracks are slowly being phased out.
So when a grand prix can produce a bit of motorsport magic authentically—not just toward the front of the field, but also deliver on all fronts—it makes people want to pull up a chair, sit down, and watch. A street race under the lights in a new city that glitters might be enough to convince fans to tune in and see the fireworks, but it’s the battles off track into the grass, the four-car-wide turn ones, and the overtakes in the least expected of places that sell tickets.
Simply put, it’s the Bearman P4 moments.
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