In theory, at least, the math suggests otherwise. Verstappen’s victory and Piastri’s race without points mean that he is now 69 points behind the Australian and 44 behind Norris, who fought to seventh position. Although they are considerable gaps (a victory awards 25 points), Verstappen has deducted 35 points from Piastri in the last two races.Definitely, Max is in contention for the drivers’ championship.
Andrea Stella
- F1 25 launches Season 3 with F2 content and driver rankings update.
Verstappen is a clear candidate, and has the right to be skeptical about suddenly being considered a man in the title fight. For this to be credible, a pattern of results in the upcoming races would be needed. However, the fact that F1 is having this conversation says a lot about Verstappen’s perception in the sport.Seven races left and still 69 points. It’s a lot. Basically, everything has to go perfectly on my side, and then I need a bit of luck on his side as well, so it’s still very difficult.
Max Verstappen
Verstappen’s recent performances have led rivals like Fernando Alonso and Gabriel Bortoleto to speak of the four-time world champion as if he were from another dimension. The aura he has built in recent years, especially in 2024 and throughout much of this season, with solid performances in cars that are perceived as difficult to drive, means that he cannot be completely ruled out. F1 has seen Verstappen star in long winning streaks, including a record streak of 10 races in 2023, and any similar period would firmly establish him as a wildcard in the final stretch.
However, what is most damaging for McLaren is that the fact that Verstappen’s wildcard status has any legitimacy suggests something else. Despite their path to the constructors’ crown last year (something the team will retain at some point in the coming months) and the Piastri-Norris battle this year, it suggests that the idea of McLaren’s fragility is also not so far from reality. Baku felt like a major pressure point, and the team didn’t respond well. How Piastri, Norris, and McLaren as a whole respond now will largely determine the look of the championship from here on out.McLaren jitters for the title?
The two McLaren title contenders were not up to par for much of the weekend. Piastri’s unusually erratic time in Baku was a real surprise. It’s rare to see the championship leader fail so significantly.Despite leaving with six points gained over his teammate and rival (reducing Piastri’s lead to 25 points), somehow Norris’s weekend felt worse. This did nothing to detract from the reputation the Englishman has earned for seeming to fall short when the pressure mounts.
Norris doesn’t like to consider the idea of wasted moments. When asked if the weekend felt like a missed opportunity or an opportunity seized, with different ways of seeing the result depending on your perspective, he said:
I’m doing the best I can in every race. If you look at it that way, every race where I finished second or worse this year was a missed opportunity. I don’t really care how people see it.
Lando Norris
Perhaps it says a lot that, precisely 12 months ago, when McLaren was equipped with a faster car, Norris left the Azerbaijan Grand Prix 69 points behind Verstappen. Unlike now, there was no doubt about how the dynamics were on the track: Red Bull was crumbling, and McLaren and Ferrari had become the cars to beat. Despite that, Norris’s threat to the championship never seemed realistic, even when the gap narrowed in the following races. Compare it to the fact that even Norris’s team boss is considering Verstappen a contender from the same distance and it says a lot about the different perceptions of the two drivers.
It will probably be read a lot in the mood Piastri was in on Sunday night. The Australian seemed very calm given how his weekend had gone. After spending some time sitting outside Turn 5 watching the race on a mobile phone, Piastri returned to the press room and was in a relatively optimistic mood. He had admitted that Norris’s poor lap in Q3 on Saturday meant that “it could have been worse”, and that’s how he behaved on Sunday night too. His focus was more on overcoming the sloppy weekend.Stella pointed out that Piastri already seemed completely at ease with the weekend by the time they spoke. Stella, who spent a lot of time working with great F1 talents while being an engineer at Ferrari at the beginning of his career, compared the Australian’s weekend to those of one of the greatest of all time in the sport.You’ll never feel incredible after a weekend like this, but ultimately I felt the pace was still good. I think it’s rare that I make so many execution errors, so I’m very focused on putting that behind me.
Oscar Piastri
Stella is right, no one can be perfect all the time, but someone who is often perfect is the man she labeled as the new contender for the wildcard championship: Verstappen.I’ve worked with multi-champion drivers, and in a season, in every season, even in the most dominant one, even by one of the best drivers in Formula 1 history, like Michael Schumacher, I’ve seen events like this. Events in which the most you get out of the weekend is learning, because things become, for some reason, difficult, and as soon as you misjudge the available grip, you are severely punished.
Andrea Stella
Verstappen on the rise
Stella’s comments about Verstappen in the championship fight may have been intended to refocus his own team as much as anything else. Verstappen’s comfortable victories at Monza and Baku have felt like the first legitimate external pressure McLaren has felt in months. Verstappen was a third wheel in the title fight for a fleeting moment earlier in the year, but he didn’t win between Imola in April and Monza earlier this month. During that period, most of the drama McLaren faced was within the confines of their own internal battle between drivers: the tightrope they’ve walked trying to ensure fairness between their two drivers, Norris’s collision with Piastri in Canada, having to rein in Piastri after near collisions with Norris in Austria and Hungary, Norris’s race retirement in the Netherlands, and then the disaster over the pit stop sequence, slow stops and position changes between the pair at Monza two weeks ago, to name a few.The combination of Red Bull’s leap forward on the track, largely attributed to a new floor the team introduced at the Italian Grand Prix, and the emphatic nature of Verstappen’s two victories since then, has felt like someone placed a jukebox outside McLaren’s garage, turned on the iconic “Jaws” theme, and slowly turned up the volume. Verstappen is circling in the distance, and now, after Baku, there’s blood in the water. Not much, but for a driver with ice in his veins like Verstappen, it’s enough.He has never been one for grand statements, and you won’t find him dwelling on the image of the championship for a while.I don’t rely on hope. I just go race by race, which is basically what I’ve been doing all season, just trying to do the best we can, trying to score as many points as possible. And then, after Abu Dhabi, we’ll know.
Max Verstappen
Fortunately for Verstappen, Red Bull and F1 fans, we won’t have to wait until the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, which closes the season, to know how legitimate Stella’s concerns are. The next race, the Singapore Grand Prix, has a rare distinction in Formula 1 as a place where Verstappen has never won. It has been a difficult track for the Milton Keynes team; Sergio Pérez’s victory in 2022 was so against the norm that it helped reinforce his old reputation as the king of street circuits.
“I hope [Verstappen will be a title contender], but I’ll think about that after Singapore,” Red Bull Racing advisor Helmut Marko told Austrian channel ORF on Sunday. “If we are competitive in Singapore, then maybe we can start dreaming. It’s not just a high aerodynamic load, it’s always infernally hot there, which our car doesn’t seem to like so much either. So it will be the real benchmark of where we are.”If Red Bull wins in Singapore, you’ll really have to start taking Stella seriously. The idea of Verstappen dominating from there to the end of the calendar wouldn’t be far-fetched: he’s that good, and he’s been that good for so long before. Verstappen is the kind of talent that can become unbeatable very quickly in the right car.Regarding that annoying 69-point gap, Verstappen has something in his back pocket that none of the McLaren drivers have: he is unlikely to lose points to his teammate in the short term. The combination of Red Bull suddenly becoming the car to beat and Piastri and Norris fighting each other without major restrictions would legitimize the idea that Verstappen is in the fight, giving him regular opportunities to cut large portions of the gap he has ahead. It still seems far-fetched, but when you put Verstappen’s name on it, you can see why that music must be playing louder and louder in Stella’s mind.
McLaren had arrived in Azerbaijan hoping to secure the constructors’ championship, which would have been the earliest anyone had done so. That championship is safe in the bag for another year, although not yet officially, but when the team leaves Baku, it does so with a tenuous target on its back and a growing shadow in the shape of Verstappen looming. Singapore will be unmissable.
