We’re witnessing something quite extraordinary.
That’s Red Bull Racing boss Laurent Mekies’s opinion after Max Verstappen’s total domination of the United States Grand Prix weekend slashed his title deficit to just 40 points with five rounds remaining.
After five rounds of being dared to believe that the championship fight is on, Red Bull Racing no longer needs convincing.
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Verstappen’s title defence, his shot at a fifth world championship, is very much alive.
The electricity of this moment is undeniable.
“Near domination today,” Red Bull Racing boss Laurent Mekies told Sky Sports.
“Max has been driving at an incredible level. We have to admit we’re witnessing something quite extraordinary, and it has produced this turnaround.”
Five races remain, and among them are some Verstappen classics. Perfection is still required, but with momentum totally with the Dutchman and his formerly down-and-out team, you’d be brave to discount a late title twist.
“The focus and the intensity is still on this weekend, on learning whatever we can still learn on this weekend and on bringing the best possible car to Mexico,” Mekies said.
“We’re going to keep that approach. We’re not looking at the big numbers. We’re looking at what we can learn every session, how we can get the best possible car on the ground in Mexico in a week’s time.”
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VERSTAPPEN IS A TITLE CONTENDER
It was in Azerbaijan, two rounds ago, that McLaren boss Andrea Stella told reporters he wanted it written in capital letters that Max Verstappen was a championship contender.
It was just after Verstappen took pole in Baku. The margin was 94 points.
Just three races later Verstappen’s deficit is down to only 40 points with five grands prix and two sprints remaining.
Stella must hate being right all the time.
We’re long past the days of Verstappen’s advantage being track specific or pertaining to prevailing conditions, and while McLaren’s didn’t have a perfectly clean weekend, it was hardly dire enough to account for the gulf in pace between the cars on a track that should have offered something for both.
“It’s probably our strongest weekend in a long while,” Mekies said. “On a burning-hot track where in the past it’s been tricky for us in these conditions, Max kept increasing the gap.”
That last part is worth emphasising. It’s not just that Verstappen is capitalising on scrappy races from the McLaren drivers; Red Bull Racing is neutralising McLaren’s previous strengths to genuinely level the playing field.
McLaren traditional tyre advantage today was negligible; it’s no longer the trump card that can save a race.
Combined with the car’s qualifying pace at a circuit that was originally in the McLaren column, it’s all good news for Red Bull Racing.
How frightening should that be for McLaren?
Let’s lay it out in numbers.
Since the mid-season break Verstappen has taken 119 points of a maximum 133 points.
Piastri has scored 62 points, while Norris has scored 57 points.
Put another way, Verstappen has scored exactly as many points as the McLaren drivers combined during the last five rounds.
Verstappen’s deficit peaked at 104 points after the Dutch Grand Prix, the first race after the break. Since then he’s taken 64 points out of Piastri’s lead — that’s a massive 16 points per weekend. He’s taken 44 points out of Norris for second place.
If the scores continue on the same trajectory, Verstappen won’t just level the title; he’ll take second place in Las Vegas and the lead in Qatar with a race to spare.
“For sure the chance is there,” Verstappen said in the clearest pronouncement of his championship ambitions this season. “We just need to try and deliver these kinds of weekends now until the end.
“We’ll try whatever we can. I think it’s exciting.”
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WHERE’S OSCAR PIASTRI GONE?
Oscar Piastri needs a podium, but the title leader couldn’t have even bought a trophy at the United States Grand Prix.
From first practice to the chequered flag the Australian was off the pace, and an anonymous fifth was all that was on offer on Sunday.
He gained one place from sixth off the line, but he rapidly lost touch with the top four in the first stint. His afternoon quickly became a defensive one to keep George Russell behind him, and while he achieved that, that condemned him to his lowest finish since the Australian Grand Prix, the first round of the season.
His problems started in qualifying, where his roughly 0.3-second gap to Norris allowed three cars to separate him from his teammate, but his bigger problem was that the race didn’t come to him in the way it would have expected to have done earlier in the year.
“I think today race pace could’ve saved you, but I didn’t really have that either,” he admitted to Sky Sports.
“This weekend, apart from Baku, has been the first weekend that’s been a let-down. Even if it’s been sup-bar before, it’s still been pretty good.
“Something to understand from this weekend because it wasn’t just related to qualifying.
“Trying to work out why I just didn’t gel with the car this weekend is the first port of call. It was just difficult to get into a rhythm at all. That’s been the big difference compared to other circuits we’ve been to, even more recently.”
It’s worth dwelling on that final assessment, that something about Piastri and this car didn’t click at this circuit.
Historically it’s not a surprise.
Over five qualifying sessions at this circuit since his 2023 debut, Piastri’s average deficit to Norris is 0.486 seconds.
Norris has outscored Piastri 59-20 in Austin over the last three seasons. On average Norris has scored 19.6 points per visit, while Piastri is taking home just 6.7 points.
By some margin this is Piastri’s biggest bogey track.
Now consider that Piastri was closer to Norris than his average and scored more points than he does on average this year.
Maybe it’s bad, but it’s not that bad, at least from the historical perspective.
What might be concerning, however, is that this feels so out of step with Piastri’s season.
Consider, for example, his 2025 results at some of his other historically weak circuits.
He won in China and Spain. He was right on the pace in Japan. In Singapore he was in the ballpark too.
But in the United States we were reminded that Piastri is still in only his third year in the sport. He’s close to the complete package, but there’s still room for improvement.
On a circuit where tyre grip was low despite high track temperatures, where the car must be leant on but constantly wants to slide out of control, Piastri was found to be lacking some tools in his tool kit.
“Some things to review on Oscar’s side,” Stella told Sky Sports. “The pace wasn’t great today, but I’m sure he will come back stronger in Mexico.”
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COULD NORRIS HAVE WON THE RACE?
Despite this being the third weekend in succession at which McLaren hasn’t been the topscoring team, principal Andrea Stella was choosing to see the positives after his drivers finished second and fifth.
“It was important today to bring home some points with both drivers to confirm that we have the pace to compete for the win,” he insisted.
“I think today without having to deal with [Charles] Leclerc for pretty much the entire race it would’ve been an interesting fight with Verstappen for the win.
“This is positive to confirm after some difficult races recently.
“I think we’ve learnt a few things over the course of these last four races in which we were not scoring the usual results. There’s been good learning. I’m sure this will be important for the finale of this season”
Leclerc jumping Norris off the line dictated the Briton’s entire race, with overtaking more difficult than usual given the important of managing tyre life to make it to the finish with just one pit stop.
Had Norris held second off the line, or had the race been a little more conventional for this track, McLaren thinks Norris had race-winning pace.
Norris, however, isn’t convinced.
“It was certainly a little bit harder than I would’ve liked,” he said. “‘I obviously would’ve liked to have challenged Max, but considering I could barely get past the Ferrari, which wasn’t as quick as Max, then I doubt I would’ve been able to get past anyway.”
But there are mitigating factors.
The reduction of practice time on a sprint weekend means teams rely on the sprint race for the long-run data they’d usually accumulate during FP2. They learn a lot about tyre life on whichever compound they choose, they learn how the car behaves when it’s loaded up with fuel and they learn where they can push their set-up choices closer to the limit or where they need to dial back for a full grand prix distance.
It’s particularly important to gather that data in Austin, where the bumpiness of the track surface changes every year. The bumps dictate how low the car can be dropped, and ride height is the most influential set-up choice when it comes to creating downforce with this generation of car.
Because Norris and Piastri were wiped out on the first lap of the sprint, McLaren lacked all that data and went into the race with a car that wasn’t as honed as it should have been.
“When you don’t have the data from the sprint race, you have to accept that you’re not going to maximise some set-up parameters which come with a lot of performance,” Stella told Sky Sports. “We knew that we were a little bit compromised, and in a way this reassured us even more that the pace is in the car, and we need to do a good job of extracting this pace for future races.”
In other words, McLaren believes its car is more competitive than it was able to show on Sunday.
It’s of course a moot point that’s impossible to test. It’s also difficult to know how much pace Verstappen had in reserve given he too was managing to make it to the finish. It was interesting too that he felt no desire to end the race with a flourish with the fastest lap in the way he might normally be expected to do.
But it’s perhaps a glimmer of hope for McLaren — and for Norris and Piastri — that the disappointment of this weekend is explainable.
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FERRARI’S CHAOTIC FORM LINE CONTINUES
You wouldn’t want to be a bookmaker offering odds on Ferrari.
The Italian team has been by far the most chaotic performer of the year, and it’s not simply about swings from race to race.
From session to session this weekend the team rocked from P-nowhere to being a podium contender fast enough to trouble McLaren.
Consider that in sprint qualifying Lewis Hamilton, the fastest Ferrari driver, was 0.892 seconds off pole.
Come grand prix qualifying Charles Leclerc was able to get just 0.297 seconds behind Verstappen and just 0.006 seconds behind Norris on the front row.
It was an almost entirely inexplicable improvement for the Monegasque, who converted third on the grid into the final spot on the podium.
“I think there will be a lot of analysis to understand why we have such a swing of performance at the same weekend,” he said. “I have some clues about it.
“I think we still need to analyse everything well to understand the full picture, because it’s been a big difference of performance from one day to another.”
What’s beyond doubt, however, is how Ferrari scored its first podium since the Belgian Grand Prix in July.
Leclerc was the only driver in the top 15 to start on the soft tyre, but what could have been easy fodder for critics of Ferrari’s strategy team turned into a masterstroke.
The extra grip helped him past Norris, and the need for all drivers to manage their tyres meant second place remained within his reach until the final five laps, when McLaren’s inherently faster car and better tyre management overwhelmed him.
The execution was slick. The focus was sharp. It was all the things Ferrari needs to demonstrate to keep the faith — and it arrived poignantly after a week of speculation about team principal Frédéric Vasseur’s position in light of rumoured talks between Maranello and Christian Horner.
“We did the perfect qualifying and race and I don’t think we can regret anything,” Leclerc said. “I think we were very brave to start on the soft, but I like that because I think we had the right strategy from the beginning, and then others kind of copied and went on the soft later on.
“I think we did a really good job extracting the maximum out of the car.”
Now back within seven points of Mercedes for second in the championship, Ferrari’s challenge now is to keep it up.