Verstappen’s title surge is over, but Brazil laid bare one key championship truth

Max Verstappen’s champion drive in the wet to win the 2024 Sao Paulo Grand Prix from 17th on the grid all but sealed him the championship, putting him in a position to clinch the title at the next round in Las Vegas.

Ironically a performance from the same top shelf in this year’s race did the opposite.

Verstappen’s mighty drive from the pit lane to the podium — only the eighth time in history a driver has managed such a feat — resulted in him losing 10 points to runaway winner Lando Norris.

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It dropped the Dutchman to 49 points off the lead with three rounds remaining, all but ending his championship defence.

“Let’s not use that word [championship] at the moment,” he said. “It’s too many points to have a proper chance at that.”

It would require a monumental turnaround perhaps even greater than his Sunday drive to rescue his title charge. He’d need to outscore Norris by more than 16 points per round — the difference between finishing first and sixth — just to pinch it in Abu Dhabi.

Even one DNF from Norris wouldn’t be enough for him to bring the title back into his orbit; he’d need a catastrophe to befall Norris and even Piastri to win his fifth crown this year.

But as the sun sets on Verstappen’s unpredictable championship defence, it’s worth reflecting on whether any more could have been done to keep him in the fight.

His comeback was iconic, but you can’t help but wonder whether even more could have been on the table.

SHOULD VERSTAPPEN HAVE WON IN BRAZIL?

The voice of Gianpiero Lambiase, Verstappen’s race engineer, crackled into life on lap 51 of 71.

“Something I didn’t think I’d say, Max, at the end of the pit lane earlier,” he said. “You are now race leader.”

It was remarkable for where he started the race and doubly so for the fact he was sent back to the back of the field after an early puncture, undoing the six overtakes he’d made on the first lap and forcing him to start his journey again.

He was in the lead after Norris, who’d otherwise controlled the race, had just pitted from first place. With Andrea Kimi Antonelli and George Russell having also changed tyres several laps earlier, and with Oscar Piastri — long out of podium contention owing to his penalty — pitting that lap, the seas had parted for Verstappen to return to his familiar first position.

It appeared to set up the race for a grandstand finish.

Norris rejoined the race eight seconds behind the Dutchman, his pit stop coming 17 laps later after Verstappen’s tyre change.

But Norris’s mediums had already had 10 laps pumped through them before the race, meaning the tyre life difference between him and Verstappen was just seven laps — less than 10 per cent of the race distance.

Norris would have to gain 0.4 seconds per lap on Verstappen just to catch him — and catching and passing Verstappen are two very different things.

It appeared Verstappen was on a trajectory to record what would have been a famous and title-energising victory.

But then he pitted on lap 54.

He’d just told the pit wall that the state of his tyres was “not ideal”, and Lambiase replied that they would take the “aggressive” option to pit him for fresh softs in the hope he could guarantee a podium finish.

He dropped to fourth, quickly passed Russell for third and came a lap or two from passing Antonelli for second.

But Norris was always going to be too far up the road to come under threat.

Was victory thrown away on a safety pit stop?

Red Bull Racing boss Laurent Mekies didn’t think so.

“We don’t think it was winnable,” he said, per Autosport. “We would probably never know where we would have finished, but obviously it’s a discussion that the guys had on the pit wall.”

“At some stage you need to make the call, and the call was made. I think it gave us a chance to have a very strong go at the podium. Ultimately we got it.”

But the decision came as a surprise to pundits and reportedly even to rival engineers, who expected Verstappen to stick it out on his wearing mediums to at least ask the question of the title leader.

It would have required the Dutchman to complete 37 laps on his medium tyres — a big ask, but hardly unachievable.

That’s not even close to the 52 laps Liam Lawson managed on the same compound.

True, Lawson knew he was intending to take his tyres to the end after stopping on lap 19 and so carefully managed his pace to get there. He finished 23 seconds behind the next car as a result, but he managed to hold up a massive train of cars, including teammate Isack Hadjar, with some expert defensive driving.

Nico Hülkenberg completed 46 laps on mediums and then 35 laps on used softs without trouble.

Piastri completed 38 laps on his opening set of mediums, and while his pace dropped off late, he was hamstrung by the flat spot he picked up in his move on Antonelli.

Red Bull Racing’s history of risk-taking must mean the team was absolutely certain the tyres wouldn’t go the distance.

But given finishing behind Norris meant his title hopes are all but over anyway, he didn’t have much to lose by staying out and seeing whether he could force a mistake from the title leader.

“It made out life a little bit easier,” McLaren boss Andrea Stella joked, though his words surely had a kernel of truth to them.

VERSTAPPEN OWNS ONE BIG ERROR

Brazil shouldn’t be remembered as a potential missed opportunity for Verstappen. His performance was too good to think of it that way.

Nor should it be remembered as the day his title hopes died.

“We didn’t lose the championship here,” he said. “We lost the championship from race one till Zandvoort.

“We had a lot of weekends where we simply were not quick enough, then of course you have a big gap.

“Then we had good moments where you get some points back, but not enough. That’s how the season goes.”

A handful of moments spring to mind in dissecting where Verstappen’s championship ran off the rails.

The first is unquestionably the Spanish Grand Prix.

While Verstappen’s 2025 season will rightly be lauded as one of his great campaigns, it wasn’t perfect.

The Dutchman was mighty in Barcelona, running an unexpected three-stop strategy to apply some serious pressure to the two-stopping Piastri and Norris in the lead.

It came to nothing, but what should have been a nailed-on third place unravelled with a late safety car that allowed almost the entire field to switch to soft tyres for a final dash to the flag.

But Verstappen had already used all his softs in his three-stop gamble. All he had left was a set of unloved hards.

He was a sitting duck at the restart, when a snap of oversteer out of the final corner gave Charles Leclerc a dream run past him, though not before the pair made light contact down the middle of the straight.

The stewards judged both drivers were equally to blame, but Verstappen was adamant he’d been “rammed”.

Things got worse when Russell tried to pass him into the first turn, but the Briton had a mid-corner wobble that sent him clattering into Verstappen, who by now was apoplectic.

Imagine, then, when he received the radio call from Lambiase to give the position to Russell to prevent a possible stewards investigation.

“What the f***!” he fumed.

He slowed down into turn 5 to had Russell the place, but before the Mercedes driver could complete the pass, Verstappen opened the throttle and rammed the Briton towards the stones.

He was handed a 10-second penalty, which left him 10th at the flag for just one championship point.

The needless bout of road rage, in other words, cost him as much as 14 points.

Had he kept his cool, his title deficit would be a more manageable 35 points with three rounds remaining.

He made one other notable mistake this season — at the British Grand Prix, where he spun out behind the second safety car.

His car was equipped with a very skinny rear win — too trimmed out for the changeable weather — but had he kept it on the road, he should have finished third ahead of Nico Hülkenberg. Instead he tiptoed to fifth, a loss of five points.

Make that a theoretical 30 points with three rounds remaining.

THERE ARE NO PERFECT SEASONS

In a season as long as this, every driver will contemplate a litany of missed chances in their mind over the off-season break.

There can be no such thing as a perfect season over 24 grands prix. Even Verstappen missed three race wins in his 2023 campaign.

But some of Red Bull Racing’s troughs were really deep.

The Hungarian Grand Prix was one of the lowest points, with Verstappen qualifying eighth and finishing ninth.

The team had gambled big on set-up after failing to coax any kind of performance from the car throughout practice, and it had backfired significantly.

Even then, though, the faster one-stop strategy — as Fernando Alonso ahead of him was clearly setting up for early in the race — could have seen him finish as high as fifth.

Red Bull Racing was far from the only team to miss the clear logic of making just one pit stop at a circuit where overtaking is always difficult — Piastri missed out on victory when Norris made the chequered flag with one fewer stop — but it was nonetheless a small missed chance.

It cost Verstappen eight points, which would have brought his hypothetical deficit down to 22 points.

And if we wanted to get deeply hypothetical, Verstappen’s first-lap wipe-out at the Austrian Grand Prix while running sixth — he was a blameless victim of an errant Antonelli — saw him lose at least eight points.

Add all those chances together and his deficit would have been just 14 points — that is, he would’ve been second in the championship behind Norris and ahead of Piastri.

And had he beaten Norris in Sao Paulo, he would’ve taken the title lead by three points.

Almost every frontrunning driver in any given season would be able to reprosecute every race to come up with a scenario in which they would be champion.

Norris and Piastri, for example, both have a long list of mistakes and imperfections, whether by their hand or the team’s, without which they could justifiably argue they’d already be world champions this year.

Piastri has had two questionable penalties nobble his points tallies. Norris is still down 18 points for his power unit problem in the Netherlands. These are just a few examples.

But in reflecting on Verstappen’s missed opportunities, it’s remarkable in fact how few they are.

His red-mist moment in Spain stands alone as a self-inflicted wound, while there were mitigating circumstances in Silverstone. Minor strategic errors here and there have cost him relatively little in the grand scheme of things. And that’s pretty much it.

Whichever of the McLaren drivers wins the world title will be a worthy champion. An intrateam battle, when necessarily neither driver truly receives the full backing of the team, brings with it unique challenges.

But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Verstappen, despite his championship charge having been all but extinguished by his exquisite Sao Paulo barnstormer, has had a season for the ages.