This time last year Lando Norris was counting the cost of a scrappy Sao Paulo Grand Prix that all but snuffed out his longshot hopes of beating Max Verstappen to the title.
In 2025 the situation has been flipped in his favour. Norris’s victory — his perfect weekend, taking sprint pole and sprint victory before doubling down in grand prix qualifying and the main race — has put him 24 points ahead in the championship battle.
Norris will deny it — every sportsperson would — but his maiden world title is now in view on the horizon. It’s close enough to touch.
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The 24-point margin is significant, putting Norris’s title hopes entirely in his own hands by removing Piastri’s destiny from his.
Piastri could win all three remaining grands prix plus the last sprint with Norris in second and he’d gain only 22 points on the Englishman. Norris would claim the crown by two points.
“Obviously there’s not a long way to go, but it can change so quickly,” Norris deflected. “Like we’ve seen today already.
“I’ll just focus on myself, keep my head down, ignore everyone and keep pushing.”
Of course the numbers aren’t unimpeachable. A failure to finish for Norris could see him lose the lead in Las Vegas, for example. And if Piastri were to win every race, it would take only one slip-up for the Briton to suddenly find himself on the back foot.
But there’s numbers and then there’s momentum, and Norris can count that on his side too.
Norris has never driven as good as this.
Cool, calm and collected, he looks eerily like the Piastri of the first half of the season. His pace is metronomic. Pole positions and victories have felt inevitable over the past two rounds. It’s not a stretch to imagine a mathematical scenario in which he loses the championship, but it’s hard to imagine it happening in real life, so irresistible has his form become.
“I’ve been pretty satisfied the whole weekend, honestly,” he said. “It’s been a great day, a great weekend, all-in-all.
“It’s not been completely straightforward. It’s still been difficult out on track, but that makes it better.
“I think it was just a well-executed race — good start, good pit stops, good strategy, decent pace.
“I wouldn’t say the pace was quite as good as what I would have liked today, so a few things to look into, but otherwise every session that I needed to be on top, I was, and that’s why I flew to Brazil.
“So yeah, very happy.”
Piastri finishes 5th after crash chaos | 03:20
VERSTAPPEN FALLS SHORT DESPITE CHAMPION DRIVE
You might have scoffed hearing Norris declare after winning the race by 10 seconds and after having led 59 of 71 laps that this wasn’t an easy victory — that he didn’t even think his McLaren was the fastest car on track.
You’d have been excused for it too if Max Verstappen hadn’t been standing beside him on the podium.
The Dutchman took a long route to third place — the longest route, in fact. He started from the pit lane and executed a masterful drive to finish on the rostrum.
He’s only the eighth driver in history to do so and the first since Lewis Hamilton steered from the pits to third place in the 2014 Hungarian Grand Prix.
It was quite literally the drive of the decade.
“I definitely didn’t expect that waking up this morning,” Verstappen said.
Of course he’s been here before, having won last year’s grand prix from 17th on the grid, but as good as that drive was — and, boy, was it good — he had the benefit of it being wet, when big moves through the field are more possible, and he capitalised on nailing the strategy around a mid-race red flag.
This year Interlagos was dry, and the only safety car came at the end of the opening lap.
In fact the interruption proved disadvantageous for Verstappen — he’d risen to 13th on the first lap but picked up a puncture, and the required pit stop dumped him to 18th and last again on lap 8.
Let’s do some rough maths.
The stop, made behind the virtual safety car, cost him 10 seconds.
He finished only 10.7 seconds behind Norris.
Consider further that he was just behind Nico Hülkenberg in 12th before making that unscheduled tyre change.
Hülkenberg was seven seconds behind Norris when the virtual safety car ended. By the time Verstappen caught and passed the Sauber on lap 17 he was 17 seconds behind Norris.
So, combined, the pit stop plus the time lost in traffic amounted to around 20 seconds.
In other words, he had more than enough pace to win this race had luck been on his side.
How is it possible that the car that qualified a meritorious 16th — out in Q1 on pure pace for the first time in Verstappen’s career — was so dominant on race day?
The answer is that it wasn’t the same car at all.
Facing a long slog in an RB21 that clearly wasn’t up to the task, Red Bull Racing withdrew Verstappen’s car from the grid on Saturday night and made some sweeping set-up and bodywork changes. The Dutchman also took on a new power unit, the penalty absorbed into his pit-lane start.
This was the third time Red Bull Racing rolled the dice on set-up, having made blind changes before sprint qualifying that left him a middling sixth and returned an ordinary fourth in the short race, and then having taken a disastrous shot in the dark before grand prix qualifying that knocked him out of Q1.
It was third time lucky. The combination of changes — plus the cooler temperatures — brought the RB21 back to life just enough for Verstappen to wield his magic.
“Unbelievable race,” team boss Laurent Mekies said. “I think this year may not be a win but it was as impressive as what he did last year.”
There were some ironies in the performance.
The first was that it took an absolutely stinking qualifying result to convince the team to roll the dice again. Had Verstappen qualified, say, 10th, it probably would have left him on the grid and he might’ve scored some minor points only.
The second was that the puncture, while setting him back around 20 seconds in total, allowed him to take off the slow hard tyre and put on the much more robust medium, giving him what turned out to be the optimum strategy.
“Very happy with that, and just very proud of everyone within the team as well,” he said. “We never give up. We always try to improve and try to find more lap time, and luckily we found that again today.”
The final irony is that, despite his on-track heroics, another 10 points lost to Norris put him 49 points off the title lead, all but extinguishing his championship hopes.
But given the speed he and the team managed to find on Sunday, there’s every chance the Dutchman still has a role to play in the how the championship battle concludes over the next three rounds.
Classy Piastri congratulates Norris | 00:37
PIASTRI COUNTS THE COST OF MISSED CHANCES, BAD LUCK
Verstappen wasn’t the only driver wondering what might have been with a little bit of extra luck.
Piastri was just recovering from the recent desertion of his form when fortune also walked on him this weekend.
The bad luck of the sprint’s wet kerb was bitter but not critical in the title fight.
His penalty for causing a collision with Andrea Kimi Antonelli, on the other hand, might prove fatal.
It condemned Piastri to his third consecutive fifth-place finish and his sixth race off the podium.
He shipped 15 points to Norris in the race and 23 for the entire weekend, blowing out his title deficit to a season-high 24 points.
Frustrating for Piastri will be that there was clearly more on the table on Sunday, but achieving it was out of his hands.
The driving standards document shoulders much of the blame for him receiving a penalty for contact that has almost universally been declared a racing incident among those in the paddock and even among most drivers. Perhaps a different set of stewards would have felt empowered to treat the document as guidelines — as it asks to be treated — rather than as law.
Copping a 10-second penalty for demonstrating the sort of bold and deft aggression Formula 1 wants to encourage — and that we should expect from a title contender — was his second dose of bad luck.
It was doubly painful considering the Australian’s pace.
His qualifying deficit was large but explainable by the conditions — extremely gusty on a track devoid of its usual grip owing to the morning’s heavy rain, and his lack of running in the sprint wouldn’t have helped him judge it.
To illustrate the point, no-one inside the top 10 — in fact no-one inside the top 14 — managed to string their three best sectors together for their fastest qualifying lap, which is highly unusual.
In the race, though, he was a much closer match for Norris.
Consider that he was just under seven seconds behind Norris at the end of the first stint.
Piastri finished the race 15.7 seconds behind his teammate. Subtract his 10-second penalty and he’d have been a comfortable second.
The data trace bears out what the numbers tell us: that Piastri was faster than Norris in the final two stints of the race.
There is a considerable asterisk here in that Norris had to go only fast enough to keep Antonelli behind him. It’s impossible to say how much he had in reserve.
Then again, the Briton said several times that he had to push hard for the entire race and the result was the maximum possible.
Consider further that McLaren tacitly admitted afterwards that Piastri’s strategy wasn’t ideal, going too deep into the race before making his first stop and then not covering Verstappen with the second stop, caught somewhere between considering a one-stop but then wanting to follow everyone else in stopping twice.
Had he used the same strategy as Verstappen, for example saving the delicate softs until the end, perhaps more could have been gained.
But that feels indicative of this stage of Piastri’s campaign since his victory in the Netherlands: he either hasn’t had the pace, or when he has, things haven’t gone his way.
“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,” he said, per ESPN.
The outcome in Brazil may have had the biggest consequence of all.
“Oh my god!” Norris on Piastri crash | 00:11
ANTONELLI SCORED CAREER-BEST RESULT — AND SETS UP TELLING TARGET
You probably wouldn’t have picked Interlagos to be Mercedes’s strongest weekend of the year in advance of the race, but the German marque will fly home from Brazil with its biggest points haul of the season for a single round courtesy of a double podium in the sprint and a two-four finish in the grand prix.
With 43 points in the bag, Mercedes has moved to second in the standings, 32 points ahead of Red Bull Racing and 36 points ahead of the hapless Ferrari.
The team was led by Andrea Kimi Antonelli at comfortably the most complete weekend of his rookie season.
Qualifying on the front row for the grand prix — after doing the same for the sprint — was his best qualifying result of the year. It was only the third time he’d outqualified George Russell, and he achieved it with the biggest margin: four places and 0.195 seconds.
He followed up by beating Russell in the race for the second consecutive weekend — and he did so in spectacular fashion, holding off the faster Verstappen in the final laps and beating him in a drag race up the hill by 0.362 seconds.
The results meant Antonelli ended the weekend as the second highest scoring driver of the round behind only Norris.
It’s the continuation — and the acceleration — of the Italian’s remarkable turnaround since the sport left Europe, and it’s just reward for Mercedes not only for backing its young protégé for an early F1 promotion but for sticking with him when the going go though in the middle of the season and the pressure ramped up considerably.
“We’ve always said he needs time to develop,” team boss Toto Wolff told Sky Sports. “He will have great moments and then tougher moments, and today was just fantastic.
“With a car that was not as fast as Max’s on a tyre that was harder and older, to keep Max Verstappen behind him, that was really nice to see.”
But wait, there’s more.
Antonelli has scored 58 points since the mid-season break.
Lewis Hamilton, the man he replaced at Mercedes, has scored just 39 points in that time.
Hamilton leads Antonelli by 26 points in the otherwise inconsequential battle for sixth in the standings.
Of course nuance is required in extrapolating these results. Ferrari has been one of the season’s most erratic performers, and Hamiton, new to the squad, has suffered most.
It’s also impossible to know how Hamilton would have performed had he remained with Mercedes.
But it would only painfully underline’s Hamilton’s struggles should Antonelli move ahead by the end of the season — and would back Wolff’s confidence that the teenager really could be the protagonist of his generation.