With Ferrari having a solid race but doing little to get the Tifosi going and nobody able to seriously challenge Max Verstappen at the front of the field, it's fair to say the 2025 Italian Grand Prix wasn't a classic.
While the race itself hardly got the blood pumping though, there were plenty of fascinating developments in season-long storylines.
Piastri plays nice with an unprecedented move
Four laps from the end of the race, Oscar Piastri obeyed team orders and let teammate and title rival Lando Norris overtake him after a botched pit-stop had dropped the Brit behind the Aussie, and for me at least, it was genuinely one of the most shocking moments of the season.
The McLaren drivers have played nice with each other all season, but I honestly couldn't believe what I was seeing when Piastri handed his title rival his three extra points this late in the campaign. Looking back over the history of the sport, that's pretty much unprecedented.
As I watched him do it, I thought back to the drivers I've seen become world champions in my lifetime. There's absolutely no chance that Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton would've followed such team orders during their intra-team title fights with Mark Webber and Nico Rosberg, and the mere thought of Fernando Alonso or Verstappen doing so if they ended up in such positions is laughable.
In fact, Verstappen literally laughed when told over the team radio that Piastri had given Norris the position back: "Ha! Just because he had a slow stop?"
Maybe Piastri is just so confident he can beat Norris that he doesn't mind giving him a few extra points. Maybe McLaren have contractual clauses that give them more control over their drivers than a team has ever had before. Maybe the new generation of drivers, who get on much better than previous ones, are bringing us into a friendlier, 'fairer' era of Formula 1.
Regardless of the reason, I don't think it's a good development. The great title fights have had aggressive, thrilling wheel-to-wheel battles accompanied by fiery human drama, and we're not getting much in the way of either in this one.
Verstappen sends a timely reminder
Verstappen is quite comfortably the best driver on the Formula 1 grid, and he reminded the world of that in Monza.
His generational brilliance hasn't been talked about much in the last few months, with his frustration in driving a poor car and his failure to secure a move to Mercedes hogging the headlines, but that was all forgotten as he blew away the rest of the field at the weekend.
The Dutchman set the fastest qualifying lap in the history of F1 on Saturday and enjoyed the biggest winning margin of any driver this season a day later. And he did all this in a car that teammate Yuki Tsunoda took to P10 in qualifying and P13 in the race. That is simply remarkable.
It was a weekend that made me think that the fact that he doesn't have a top car most of the time and probably won't next season is good for the sport. With Hamilton and Alonso most likely past their best, I'm really not sure that anybody could get anywhere near him in evenly-matched machinery. As was the case in 2022 and 2023, things would probably get very boring very fast.
Whoever finds themselves in a better car than Verstappen in the next few years had better take advantage, because if or when he's back in one, wins and titles for anyone else will be hard to come by.
Antonelli's honeymoon period is very much over
Kimi Antonelli could do no wrong earlier this season. Toto Wolff's golden boy, the young Italian retained the full faith of his boss and team regardless of how he performed, so much so that when it emerged that Mercedes were weighing up a move for Verstappen, there was little doubt that George Russell, rather than Antonelli, would've been the one to make way. Now though, the teenager is running out of goodwill.
His form has dropped off hugely since he scored his first podium in Canada back in June, with multiple costly errors and just three points coming in the six rounds since. One of those points was scored in his home race, but he really should've picked up more, being beaten by Gabriel Bortoleto and Alex Albon, both of whom were in slower cars and started behind him.
He's lacked pace and has picked up numerous penalties in the last two rounds alone, the last of which came for forcing Albon off track in Monza, and Wolff is finally running out of patience.
"Underwhelming this weekend. Underwhelming," said the team boss. "All of the race was underwhelming. It doesn't change anything on my support and confidence in his future because I believe he's going to be very, very, very good. But today was... underwhelming."
Compared to how the Austrian has spoken publicly about Antonelli before, that's pretty damning, and a clear message that he needs to step things up ahead of a season in which he's likely to be in a car good enough to fight for wins and maybe even the title.
After all, a certain Dutchman remains keen on a move to the German team...
