An overview of the current penalty points before the 2025 Formula 1 season – World Champion Max Verstappen has to be careful until the summer
With the new 2025 Formula 1 season, the chance to accumulate penalty points on your account begins again. Drivers receive a different number of penalty points for offenses on the track – anyone who has accumulated twelve points within a year is banned from competing in a race.
The 20 drivers start the new year with different requirements. Some drivers, such as Lewis Hamilton, start in Australia with a clean slate, while others, such as Max Verstappen, cannot afford to make too many mistakes.
The Dutchman in particular has to be careful because he is only four points away from a ban. It will be quite a while before his first points expire: the Red Bull driver only scored his first points on June 30 of last year.
That means: Verstappen is in any case at eight points for eleven races of the season. This means that he is not as acutely endangered as Pierre Gasly in 2023, who could only afford a maximum of one more point in the early stages of the season, but still, the leeway is not particularly large.
Drivers who are new to Formula 1 start without points – regardless of whether they were on the verge of a ban in the previous season in Formula 2. Thus Andrea Kimi Antonelli (Mercedes), Gabriel Bortoleto (Sauber) and Isack Hadjar (Racing Bulls) start from zero, just like Jack Doohan (Alpine), who did not collect a penalty point on his debut in Abu Dhabi.
Haas driver Oliver Bearman, on the other hand, is starting his first season with two points, which he received for a collision with Franco Colapinto during his race in Brazil.
