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Thanks all! Love 18 - great clue, should’ve got that. Google helped in the end with the manual

Noeyedea to get the answer to 18a look carefully at the words that follow "leaderless" then make them so, and the answer should leap out at you! It was my LOI so I had something of a PDM then kicked myself...

I'm flabbergasted that there are people saying they found this to be on the easy side, even after I worked out how 13a worked it took me an age, especially as I'd never heard of 6a, 19d or 25a, and needed the crossers & Google to resolve them.

A very good crossword though, worthy of a prize indeed! Thanks to Brendan(s).

All ✔️ thanks to the help on here, don’t quite get the parsing for 23ac or 20d but an enjoyable morning especially for the PDM for 13! Must get out and enjoy the sunshine now...

Thanks Noeyedeer,

23a - If you take the middle 4 letters and jut repeat them you get a "disease" and that go inside a single letter "one" and single letter "area".

20d - Single letter for "good" + a 6 letter "fruit" minus its last letter/"pruned" - definition is "problem with equipment.

Thanks Justsolve, judging by the posts so far, this puzzle is definitely proving popular 👍

Certainly popular with me - and I found it quite easy, especially with the help of 13ac, once I'd realised that the letters are in the order of the clues - but frustrated that I can't parse 7d, even though the answer is (I hope) obviously races of the kind where runners do not all run at the same time.

one person only wouldn't have much chance!

Ho Ronpegram,

7d - That's all there is to it - the individual individual runners only run part of the way so, for each of them, they are "races they can't complete".

Just finished. What a wonderful crossword and to get the homophones in the correct order is genius. Many thanks to Geeker on this one. Your subtle hints early on to the theme greatly helped the solve. My only issue is 25 across. The pronunciation on Google has it as a different vowel sound to what it should br. As no one else has mentioned this previously it must be me. Can you put me right please?

Hi Stevie,

Chambers gives two pronunciations for the first part of the clue, one of which is the required homophone.