SÃO PAULO — As Lando Norris delivered another critic-quieting performance of championship calibre at Interlagos, two relatively small moments for Oscar Piastri moved him closer to what is looking more and more likely to be a painful runner-up finish in the 2025 Formula 1 drivers’ championship.
Another near-perfect weekend for Norris has moved him 24 points clear of Piastri with three race weekends — one of which includes a sprint — left to run. It is a scenario that would have seemed unlikely two months ago, when Norris’ late car failure at the Dutch Grand Prix and Piastri’s victory left the Australian driver 34 points clear and seemingly on course for his first world championship.
Even before that, many doubted whether Norris possessed the all-important right stuff required to be champion. His up-and-down form before the summer break made for an easy stick with which to beat him. Norris appeared to reference a lot of that chatter on Sunday immediately after his win in Brazil.
“Just ignore everyone that talks crap about you,” he said. “Just focus on yourself.”
It’s fair for Norris to be so frank about it. The British driver has faced criticism over the past 18 months for his handling of high-pressure moments. The wrap on Norris had long been that when the lights were a little too bright, he crumbled.
There have been examples that supported the theory, but it must be said, that has seemed like a more fair assessment of Piastri’s recent run. There are numerous reasons why the 24-year-old Australian’s form has spiraled so dramatically since mid-September, but Norris — even in his lowest moments — never came close to this kind of run of results.
A few months ago, if Norris had been scoring the results that Piastri has been producing lately, the noise on social media would have been deafening.
Not long ago, the negativity around Norris’ season and title hopes was hard to ignore. He had come into his seventh F1 season heavily favored for the title, with McLaren emerging from testing with the benchmark car, but it was third-year F1 driver Piastri who had looked more like the champion-in-waiting as the sport hit the midseason break. Piastri’s ice-cool demeanor, his metronomic pace and his handling of wheel-to-wheel battles with Max Verstappen earned him comparisons to the reigning world champion in how he went about his racing. It was all the more remarkable how relatively quickly in his career he had arrived at that moment compared to a veteran like Norris.
That version of Piastri is a distant memory at the moment.
Norris spoke about his critics a little more in the news conference that followed his victory, acknowledging that much of it has spurred him on this year.
“There’s always people out there that try and bring you down a little bit,” Norris said. “I guess it’s quite normal, but yeah, also, when you’re on a big stage, there’s a lot of people that talk and say things, try and influence other people to have effects.”
Norris referenced the booing that followed his win in Mexico two weeks ago. Even as they stood together on the podium on Sunday, the familiar chant of “Du du du du, Max Verstappen, du du du du” rung out from the crowd below.
“Even the cheers and the not-cheers, you still hear it,” Norris continued. “It’s not the nicest thing, but I think it’s something I’ve done well over the last few months. I care a lot about people’s perspectives and how I’m portrayed and things in the media.
“I probably cared too much — even at the beginning of the year, I think I cared too much, and probably it was affecting me in not the best ways. I’ve just learned to deal with those things better — not by not caring, because I still always want to have a good impression, I never want to be rude or do those things — but I’ll always try and make my point and say what I believe in.”
Of course, Norris still has to bring it home. The memory of his out-of-nowhere Zandvoort car failure and the way he has so quickly flipped the title race on its head will have taught him not to assume that the title is now guaranteed to be his. Should the car not fail him, should he keep out of trouble in the run-in, Norris looks the man most likely to claim the championship, especially now that he has a healthy points buffer to play with too.
He’s finally risen to the occasion. If this season does end up belonging to Norris when it’s all said and done, that pesky old narrative about not looking like a worthy champion can be consigned to the past.
Piastri’s costly weekend
Piastri’s São Paulo Grand Prix was the fifth F1 weekend in a row where he failed to appear on the podium – two of which, including this one, were sprint weekends. He crashed out of Saturday’s in dramatic but quite unusual circumstances, driving over a kerb with a small puddle of water on it and spinning out and into the wall. Pouring salt into the wound, that water had been dispersed there by Norris’ car passing through the same part of the track moments earlier.
Verstappen had almost been caught out in the same way, catching a slide through the corner moments after Piastri had gone off, highlighting how tricky the corner was at that particular time.
“Whether you could call it an excuse or a reason for crashing, I don’t know. I think I’ll still call it an excuse,” Piastri said. “Yeah, it’s just very, very fine margins and tough moments and things that could easily go either way that are creating big consequences at the moment.”
Those fine margins continued to bite him in a harsh way on Sunday.
From fourth on the grid, Piastri briefly had his teammate’s gearbox and rear wing in his sights during the grand prix, having barged past Kimi Antonelli at the safety car restart in a thrilling three-wide battle that momentarily moved him up to second. It provided a tantalizing, but fleeting, feeling that Piastri might be able to fight Norris to the finish.
Piastri has not become a bad driver overnight, and there has been a feeling in the paddock that he needed a headline result or two to effectively reset his title bid. The stewards intervened before he had a chance to deliver one, handing him a 10-second penalty for the Antonelli clash.
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Leclerc forced out after three-way collision with Piastri & Antonelli
Charles Leclerc retires from the Brazilian Grand Prix after a dramatic safety car restart.
It was a harsh interpretation of F1’s rulebook — even the man who paid the highest price for the collision agreed. Charles Leclerc‘s race had ended on the spot when Antonelli’s car had been pitched into his, removing the Ferrari’s tire.
“I watched it from afar, from where I was sat in the grass looking at the big screen from far,” Leclerc said later. “It’s a shame. Collateral damage of an incident between Oscar and Kimi, where in my opinion actually Kimi was as much to blame as Oscar. For me it’s a bit of a 50-50 incident, Oscar being optimistic, Kimi doing the corner like Oscar was never there.”
Fifty-fifty would have been a fair call, especially given that it was a racing moment at the restart of a race, when stewards often err on the side of leniency. To pplace the blame squarely at Piastri’s feet was a number of things: inconvenient for his crumbling title chances but also frustrating in the context of the already-muddy racing rules that are a regular talking point among F1 fans. Guessing what will and won’t be a penalty in modern F1 races has become a difficult task indeed.
Piastri, known at McLaren for how calm and stoic he is in the face of almost any situation, was philosophical about the collision and the price he ultimately paid.
“I think the decision today [to go for the move] I’m already pretty at peace with,” Piastri said on Sunday afternoon. “It kind of is what it is.”
Most frustrating of all was that Piastri’s pace after serving the penalty at his first stop had been good enough to suggest a better result would or should have been his had circumstances been better.
Later in the race, Piastri was on the radio voicing his trepidation with the strategy McLaren chose, and in hindsight it appeared Piastri’s doubts had been well founded. McLaren later conceded to the media it should have covered off Verstappen’s stop sooner to give him a fighting chance at a podium.
Fifth place could have been fourth, if not even better. Agonizingly, if you deducted 10 seconds from his overall race time, he comfortably would have been second.
Speaking to people at McLaren and those who work solely with Piastri, many point out how impressive it is that a third-year driver has run Norris so closely, when you consider their respective careers to this point. That earlier version of Piastri surely still exists, and it must be said that he is by no means dead and buried in the title race. Another Norris race retirement in Las Vegas would blow the door wide open again, although another strong race from the No. 4 car would also put the championship almost out of Piastri’s reach.
Worst of all for Piastri — and another fact that would have been unthinkable weeks ago — is that the championship fight is no longer in his hands. Even if he were to win the remaining three races and Qatar’s sprint race, Norris would still claim the title if he finished second on each occasion. That’s never a comfortable position for a driver to be in, but then maybe Piastri will find the vaguely helpless situation as freeing as Norris appears to have in the races since Zandvoort.
It would need to be a remarkable, and very quick, turnaround. While you’d have backed the Piastri of April to August to do it, the same cannot be said of the Piastri of September to now.
Norris has proved a lot of people wrong lately; Piastri is now the one who needs to do the same if he wants any chance of being world champion this year.
Verstappen bows out in style
Even if the Interlagos weekend has effectively (but not mathematically) ended the hype around his unlikely title bid, it would be wrong not to give a nod to Verstappen’s spectacular Sunday performance. He’s effectively two race wins behind Norris now, but that was not the headline of his race.
It says a lot about the standing in which Verstappen is held that a charge through the field did not feel like an outrageous prospect, even after his pit-lane start was confirmed on Sunday. The team broke paddock curfew to make wholesale changes to the car, giving him a new setup, switching back to the floor that had been on the car when he won in Austin, and fitting his Red Bull with a brand-new engine. As per the rules, a start from the pit lane was the payoff.
The Verstappen of qualifying on Saturday had been unrecognizable, dropping out of Q1 on merit for the first time in his storied career. His grid position and performance, then, had been more like those of the teammates who have struggled so mightily to get anything out of the Red Bull race car in recent seasons.
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Kimi Antonelli & Max Verstappen react to podium finish in Brazil
Kimi Antonelli and Max Verstappen reflect on the Brazilian Grand Prix.
What followed on Sunday was very recognizable to anyone who has followed Formula 1 lately. Even an early puncture did not thwart his charge through the field. After stopping four times, he narrowly missed out on beating Antonelli across the line in a drag race for second position, but a podium was more than enough of a reward for the performance.
It was another legendary drive from a legendary driver.
“I didn’t expect that at all,” Verstappen said afterward. “Even with a puncture as well in the beginning of the race; that’s why we had to box again.
“An incredible result for us. Very happy with that and just very proud of everyone within the team as well. Yesterday was very tough for us, but we never give up. We always try to improve and try to find more lap time. Luckily, we found that again today.”
Verstappen’s 2025 season might have done more for his legacy as an all-time great of the sport than any of the four championship campaigns that preceded it, which speaks to just how good he has been. His 2025 might be similar to how Fernando Alonso‘s incredible, but ultimately title-less, 2012 season burnished his own career as a driver of a special pedigree. Some may well already consider Verstappen the greatest in terms of what he is able to do with a race car, and races like this year’s São Paulo Grand Prix will be Exhibit A when future articles are written explaining why. He is one of those rare drivers who appears able to achieve anything — no matter how outrageous the suggestion — and watching him on days like Sunday should make anyone grateful they are a fan of the sport while he is at his peak.
Even 1996 world champion Damon Hill — whom the Verstappens and Red Bull have in the past felt has been unduly harsh on Max in his role as a Sky Sports F1 pundit — singled him out for the highest of praise.
“Just amazing from Max. A Sennaesque drive from the Pit Lane. Puncture. 4 stops. Passes,” he tweeted. “Senna would have loved that drive and that race today.”
The Ayrton Senna comparison is not a new one for Verstappen. He put together another Senna-esque drive at the same venue 12 months earlier, winning from 17th on the grid in pouring rain, which is rightly considered one of — if not the — performance of the modern era.
There might not have been the same weather this time around, but it was a drive of the same otherworldly ilk. Given that, it’s perhaps not surprising the Brazilian crowd was chanting his famous song so loudly as he stood on the third step of the podium on Sunday afternoon.
