BAKU, Azerbaijan — Max Verstappen doing Max Verstappen things. Formula 1 has become so accustomed to his greatness, the idea that the Dutchman could be a contender in the 2025 title fight does not seem as outlandish as it might for any other driver trailing the championship leader by 69 points with seven races remaining.
Verstappen’s flawless Azerbaijan Grand Prix weekend (pole position, fastest lap and the race victory) came in tandem with a chaotic and error-strewn one for McLaren. Championship leader Oscar Piastri crashed out of qualifying and then the opening lap of the race, leaving Baku without a point; teammate and title rival Lando Norris appeared to squander golden opportunities to twist the knife on both Saturday and Sunday; and the team was tardy on a crucial pit stop for the second weekend in a row. It was an alarmingly sloppy weekend for the team that has dominated most of the season.
Verstappen’s qualifying performance led McLaren boss Andrea Stella to say on Saturday evening — when Verstappen was trailing by 94 points — that he was so confident the Dutchman was in the title fight that the media could capitalize his quote for emphasis. Twenty-four hours later, he doubled down.
“Definitely, Max is in contention for the drivers’ championship,” Stella said. “We knew it, and we got confirmation today.”
On paper, at least, the math would suggest otherwise.
Verstappen’s win and Piastri’s scoreless race means he’s now 69 points behind the Australian and 44 behind Norris, who labored to seventh position at the end of another frustrating showing. Both are massive gaps, with a victory earning a driver 25 points, but Verstappen has taken 35 out of Piastri in the past two races alone.
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Verstappen did not bite on the suggestion that he’s now a title contender.
“Seven races to go and it’s still 69 points? It’s a lot,” he said on Sunday evening. “Basically everything needs to go perfect from my side, and then a bit of luck from there from their side I need as well, you know, so it’s still very tough.”
Verstappen is a massive outsider, and he has every right to be skeptical about suddenly being framed as a man in the title fight. A pattern of results would need to emerge in the next few races for it to seem genuine. But it says a lot about how F1 views Verstappen that the sport could even be having the conversation.
Recent performances have had rivals such as Fernando Alonso and Gabriel Bortoleto speaking about the four-time world champion as if he’s from another dimension. The aura he has built around himself in recent years — especially in 2024 and for much of this campaign, with strong performances in cars perceived to be difficult to drive — means he cannot be written off completely. F1 has seen Verstappen go on long victory streaks before — including a record-breaking 10-race run in 2023 — and any similar spell would firmly establish him as a wild card in the run-in.
But, more damningly for McLaren, the fact Verstappen’s status as a wild card has any legitimacy speaks to something else. Despite its run 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 fragility is also not too far-fetched. Baku felt like a big pressure point, and the team did not respond well. How Piastri, Norris and McLaren as a whole respond now will go a great deal of the way to dictating what the championship looks like from here.
McLaren getting title jitters?
McLaren’s two title contenders did not look the part for much of the weekend. Piastri’s uncharacteristically error-strewn time in Baku was a genuine surprise. It is rare to see a championship leader falter in such major fashion.
Despite leaving with six points gained over his teammate and rival (taking Piastri’s lead down to 25 points), somehow Norris’ weekend felt worse. It did little to downplay the reputation the Englishman has gained for seeming to fall short when the heat is on.
A fair assessment of the two McLaren drivers this year has been that, while neither has been regularly quicker than the other, one (Piastri) certainly has been less error prone than the other. That’s why Piastri’s awful weekend felt like such a golden opportunity for Norris. The points swing should have been so much greater, especially with the mixed-up grid Saturday’s wild qualifying produced. With either a better lap in qualifying or a stronger race once Piastri crashed out, Norris could have completely reset the dynamic of the championship battle.
Norris does not like to entertain the idea of squandered moments. When asked by ESPN whether the weekend felt like an opportunity lost or an opportunity taken, with different ways of viewing the outcome depending on your perspective, he said: “I’m doing the best I can in every race. If you look at it like that, every race I finished second or worse this year was an opportunity lost. I don’t really care how people look at it.”
It perhaps 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 dynamic on track was: Red Bull was unravelling, and McLaren and Ferrari had become the cars to beat. Despite that, Norris’ championship threat never felt like a realistic one, even as the gap came down in the races that followed. Compare that with the fact that even Norris’ own team boss is entertaining Verstappen being a contender from the same distance back and it says a lot about the different perceptions of the two drivers.
A lot probably will be read into the mood Piastri was in on Sunday evening. The Australian seemed very calm given how his weekend had gone. Having spent some time sat on the outside of Turn 5 watching the race on a mobile phone, Piastri returned to the media pen and was in a relatively upbeat mood. He had admitted Norris’ poor Q3 lap on Saturday meant it “could have been worse,” and that was the way he carried himself on Sunday evening too. His focus was more on moving on from the sloppy weekend.
“You’re never going to feel amazing after a weekend like this, but ultimately I felt like the pace has still been good,” Piastri said. “I think it’s rare that I have so many executional errors, so very much focused on putting that behind me.
“There’s not been anything that different. It depends how you want to look at that. For me, if I felt like I was in a completely different headspace, then it’s easier to blame it on that. And also a problem to rectify, I guess. This weekend’s felt like any other weekend, just unfortunately there’s been far too many mistakes from start to finish.”
Stella pointed out that Piastri already seemed completely at ease with the weekend by the time they spoke. Stella, who spent a long time working with great F1 talents while an engineer at Ferrari at the beginning of his career, compared the Australian’s weekend to those of one of the sport’s all-time greats.
“I have worked with multi-champion drivers, and in a season — every season, even the most dominant — even by one of the best drivers in the history of Formula 1, like Michael Schumacher, I have seen events like this,” Stella said. “Events in which the most you take away [from the weekend] is the learning, because things become, for some reasons, difficult, and as soon as you misjudge the grip available, you get highly punished.
“So, a one-off weekend in which things don’t go his way, and he ultimately had a loss to review. It is no surprise, no exception that we should not be worried about it, because this has happened to pretty much all champions, even the ones with the best track record.”
Stella is right, no one can be flawless all the time, but someone who so often is flawless is the man he labelled the new wild-card championship contender: Verstappen.
Verstappen on the rise
Stella’s comments about Verstappen being in the championship hunt might have been intended to refocus his own team as much as anything else.
Verstappen’s comfortable pair of wins in Monza and Baku have felt like the first bit of legitimate external pressure McLaren has felt for months. Verstappen was a third wheel in the title fight for a passing moment earlier in the year, but he did not win between Imola in April and Monza earlier this month. During that spell, most of the drama McLaren faced was within the confines of its own intra-team drivers’ battle: the tightrope it has walked trying to ensure fairness between its two drivers, Norris’ collision with Piastri in Canada, having to rein in Piastri after near collisions with Norris in Austria and Hungary, Norris’ race retirement in the Netherlands, and then the debacle over pit-stop sequencing, slow stops and position swaps between the pair in Monza two weeks ago, to name but a few.
The combination of Red Bull’s leap forward on track, largely credited to a new floor the team introduced at the Italian Grand Prix, and the emphatic nature of Verstappen’s two race wins since, has felt akin to someone placing a jukebox outside McLaren’s garage, turning on the iconic theme to “Jaws” and slowly raising 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 declarations, and you will not find him dwelling on the championship picture for a little while yet.
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Verstappen calls Baku win ‘another incredible weekend’
Max Verstappen and Carlos Sainz react to their first and third place finishes respectively at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
“I don’t rely on hope,” he said on Sunday evening. “I just go race by race, what I have been doing basically the whole season — just trying to do the best we can, try to score the most points that we can. And then after Abu Dhabi, we’ll know.”
Luckily for Verstappen, Red Bull and F1 fans, we won’t have to wait until the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix to find out how legitimate Stella’s concerns are. The next race, the Singapore Grand Prix, holds a rare distinction in Formula 1 as a venue Verstappen has never won at. It’s been a bogey track for the Milton Keynes team; Sergio Pérez‘s 2022 win there was so against the grain that it helped reinforce his old reputation as the king of street race venues.
“I hope [Verstappen is a title contender], but I will think about that after Singapore,” Red Bull Racing adviser Helmut Marko said to Austrian channel ORF on Sunday. “If we are competitive in Singapore, then maybe we can start dreaming. It’s not only high downforce, it’s bloody hot always there, which our car also doesn’t seem to like so much. So it will be the real benchmark where we are.”
If Red Bull wins in Singapore, you will really have to start taking Stella at his word. The idea of Verstappen running the table from there until the end of the calendar would not be a ridiculous one: he’s that good, and he’s been that good for that long before. Verstappen is the kind of talent who can become unbeatable very quickly in the right car.
As for that pesky 69-point gap, Verstappen has something in his back pocket neither McLaren driver does: he is unlikely to lose points to his teammate any time soon. 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 hunt, giving him regular opportunities to take big chunks out of the gap in front.
It still seems fanciful, but when you put Verstappen’s name to it, you can see why that music must be getting louder and louder in the back of Stella’s mind.
McLaren had arrived in Azerbaijan hoping to wrap up the constructors’ championship, which would have been the earliest anyone has ever done it. That championship is safe in the bag for another year, even if not yet officially, but as the team leaves Baku, it does so with a faint target on its back and a growing Verstappen-shaped shadow looming. Singapore will be unmissable.
