Of all the pre-race permutations for the Italian Grand Prix, Max Verstappen romping home to the season’s biggest victory ahead of a muddled McLaren must have been among the least likely.

Victory in Monza was only the third win for Verstappen this season, and it came at one of its worst circuits of 2024, the high-speed track having laid bare all Red Bull Racing’s deeply ingrained problems just 12 months earlier.

Yet there was Verstappen doing to Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri what they had so often this season done to him.

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“The car was doing a little bit more what I liked,” Verstappen said. “This weekend has been another step forward with the behaviour of the car, and that then shows in the race.

“The positive is that we seem to understand a little bit more what we need to do with the car to be more competitive.”

But it’s not just that Red Bull Racing suddenly appears resurgent. It’s what that means for the championship.

If this is in fact a real recovery, it’s come much too late for the constructors championship, which will likely be sewn up this weekend. Even the drivers title is already out of reach, having long ago become a straight battle between Piastri and Norris.

But if Verstappen is back in the fight for victories, back regularly taking poles and podiums, he will become an uncomfortable, inconvenient wildcard that could decide which driver joins him as a world champion by the end of the season.

And ironically that position may have come about from the season’s highest profile sacking.

PIT TALK PODCAST: Was McLaren right to tell Oscar Piastri to move aside for Lando Norris to finish second in Italy — and should the Australian have obeyed? Listen to Pit Talk below.

RED BULL RACING’S PACE ADVANTAGE WAS GENUINE

Amid the excitement — or dread — of Red Bull Racing’s recovery, it’s worth considering how the team managed to perform so strongly at what should have been a weak circuit for the RB21.

Part of the equation is that the track deprioritised McLaren’s strengths.

The otherwise all-conquering McLaren MCL39 is an aerodynamically efficient car, which means it can load up on downforce to be strong in the corners without too negative an effect on straight-line speed.

But with so few corners at Monza — and with those few corners being far less important than the straights — that advantage is neutralised. When 83 per cent of the 5.793-kilometre lap is spent at full throttle, everyone prioritises speed down the straights.

That factor was exacerbated by the fact Monza’s new surface, laid in 2024, had matured and was generating much more grip than in the past, to some extent equalising cornering performance for all teams.

It’s why Monza saw one of the smallest field spreads in qualifying of any round this season.

But Verstappen wasn’t just a match for McLaren. He decisively took pole and controlled the race. His flying lap on Saturday was the fastest ever recorded in Formula 1, and he won the shortest grand prix in history.

Red Bull Racing also made gains.

The team’s 2024 car was exposed badly in low-downforce configuration, when the lack of wing made it harder to disguise some chronic balance problems that saw the car oversteer and understeer in the same corner as the aero balance shifted from entry to exit.

It was an unsolvable conundrum, and Verstappen qualified seventh and 0.7 seconds off the pace before finishing sixth and 38 seconds behind the winner.

One big change was immediately put in the pipeline: unlike in 2024, this year RBR brought a Monza-specific low-downforce rear wing to Italy, like most teams usually do.

Further, however, this season the worst of the balance problems have been solved — or, perhaps more accurately, been ameliorated enough to give Verstappen a chance.

The Dutchman broke with advice from his engineers to run with as skinny a rear wing as possible. It should have made the car too skittish to drive, but instead he and his engineering team found a way to balance the car just so with some tweaks to the front wing.

It was a deft bit of finessing that paid major dividends. For only the third race this season the Red Bull Racing car was back in its sweet spot, and Verstappen was back to his best.

But of course Monza is one of Formula 1’s most extreme outliers. Performance there doesn’t necessarily translate to other tracks.

But it’s the way that Verstappen and his team nailed the chance that hints at a genuine upturn.

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THE NO-HORNER FACTOR

The Red Bull Racing garage was jubilant in Monza, but not just because of the victory.

According to Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko, the result was vindication for a new approach.

Specifically the new approach appears to have involved sacking Christian Horner and installing Laurent Mekies as team principal.

“The preparation of a weekend is a different one now,” Marko said, per Autosport.

“Laurent is an excellent engineer, so now the idea is more to take whatever the simulation shows us but mix that with the experience that Max has and with the experience that our racing engineers have.

“The whole technical team is more open now and they discuss things. They are not blindly taking what the simulation says.

“That’s how we want to make a car that is more predictable and drivable.”

The implication appears to be that the team has been reconfigured under Mekies’s stewardship. The team boss hasn’t made any obvious personnel changes, but Marko’s suggestion is that those already working there have been empowered to reach their potential.

Verstappen corroborated Marko’s opinion, reporting after victory that Mekies had given the team direction when previous there’d been none.

“Up until now we’ve had a lot of races where we were just shooting left and right a little bit with the set-up of the car,” he said. “They were quite extreme changes, which shows that we were not in control. We were not fully understanding what to do.

“With Laurent having an engineering background, he’s asking the right questions to the engineers — commonsense questions — so I think that works really well.

“I definitely felt that in Zandvoort already we took a step that seemed to work quite well, and then here another step which felt again a little bit better.”

Rumours had long suggested that the Verstappen camp had been losing confidence in the Red Bull Racing technical structure in the lead-up to Horner’s shock July sacking. Reportedly he’d felt his opinions on development had been ignored, with the car getting worse to drive as a result.

It was interesting, then, to hear Marko also credit the victory to Verstappen’s instincts.

“The engineers are listening more to the drivers now,” he said. “If you have such a fast and experienced driver, I think that’s the right way to do it. He has to drive the car anyway, and in the end it was important that our top speed improved.

“We saw that we could drive away from the McLarens. The driver’s input was recognised.

“This feels like a rebirth for us. We’re all overjoyed. The atmosphere is fantastic, and the Red Bull spirit is back.”

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RED BULL RACING FOLLOWS THE PATH

For his part, Mekies reflected any credit paid to him back at the team.

“The level of my contribution is zero,” he said, per Autosport, noting that he’d been in the role for barely two months.

“I’m not joking either. It’s 1500 people working on making the car faster, so these are the talents that make the car faster, that make the hundredths and the thousandths and that make the set of options with the new components available.

“[My] only role is to make sure that the talents that we have are put in the right conditions to express that talent at best. That’s the only thing we are doing, so that’s the extent of the contribution. That’s it, nothing more.”

Notably Mekies chose to send technical director Pierre Waché to collect the winner’s trophy on the podium with Verstappen. Waché had been under fire late in Horner’s tenure as the head of the technical team that delivered this year’s underwhelming car.

Horner stood on the podium alongside Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber to collect the trophy for his first victory as team principal in 2009 — though they were totally different times and different circumstances, with that also being Red Bull Racing’s first victory.

It’s interesting to observe that Mekies’s tenure has so far been heralded in much the same way as Andrea Stella’s ascension to the top job at McLaren.

While Stella did make some immediately personnel changes — notably he sacked then technical director James Key amid the team’s poor start to 2023 — his time in the top job has been more about him getting the most from what he already had and then adding where necessary.

Both Stella and Mekies, as former engineers, appear to be much better placed to empower their technical teams than a CEO-style management figure.

It’s also worth noting that former engineers and mechanics now dominate the team principal roles in Formula 1: Andy Cowell at Aston Martin, Ayao Komatsu at Haas, Alan Permane at Racing Bulls, James Vowles at Williams and Jonathan Wheatley at Sauber are all in Mekies and Stella’s camp.

Red Bull Racing, for so long having fancied itself as a disruptive force, is profiting from modern orthodoxy.

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VERSTAPPEN STILL A TITLE FORCE

When Verstappen and Red Bull Racing were still in reasonable form early this season, delivering Verstappen two wins from the first seven rounds, he looked like an outside title contender.

It’s worth remembering that he was only 22 points off the lead after winning the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix in May. It was only after those rounds that the gap between the teams widened, allowing Piastri and Norris to escape up the title table.

But it’s instructive to consider that Verstappen finished ahead of at least one McLaren driver at four of the seven opening grands prix.

Having him in the mix considerably alters the title calculus.

“It would certainly make my life easier if there were some more drivers in between every now and then,” Norris said, per ESPN, reflecting on the points lost to retirement from the Dutch Grand Prix with a power unit problem.

“The thing is, we’re so dominant as a team. That almost makes my life harder, so that’s really the most frustrating part of it all.”

The logic is clear. If McLaren is scoring one-twos, the most Norris can take out of Piastri’s lead is seven points. Piastri and Norris are 8-7 head to head for races this season. It would take a considerable change in form for the Briton to close the gap.

If, however, Verstappen were getting between him and Piastri, he could boost the difference to 10 points per grand prix — a small but potentially decisive difference.

The only problem for him is that Verstappen isn’t here to finish second.

In Italy the Dutchman showed the flaw in that logic. Sprinting away to victory, he ensured Norris could take only three points out of Piastri’s lead despite leading the Australian for the entire race bar the late team orders muddle.

The question for the McLaren drivers, therefore, might be not whether Red Bull Racing is back. It might be how good Red Bull Racing could be.

And of course that’s before taking into account that, with nothing on the line, Verstappen will be racing the McLaren drivers with a freedom they simply can’t afford. They have everything to lose, while he can only gain.

“With the speed we’ve shown, we should hopefully be able to compete on our own merit at almost every circuit,” Marko told Austrian TV.

“We’re still finetuning and refining things. If we can keep improving like this, that would be fantastic.

“The championship is gone, but a few more wins would be very nice.”

The title might be gone, but Verstappen still has a central role in the fight to decide who gets it.