How Lando Norris earned his F1 title in high-pressure season showdown

The season ended rapid-fire on consecutive weekends and amid those shots a new world champion was crowned. In Vegas Max Verstappen re-lit the dying embers of his title challenge with a victory around the cold desert night-time track, one which was decided in the opening seconds after he suckered the pole-sitting Lando Norris into a Turn 1 error. Things got yet better for the Red Bull driver post-race as runner-up Norris, together with his fourth-placed McLaren team-mate and title rival Oscar Piastri, were disqualified for excessive plank wear. Although this left Norris still 24 points clear with two races to go, it brought Verstappen level with Piastri.

The competitive dynamic which had brought Verstappen within McLaren’s panic range had been driven by the strides Red Bull had made in improving the car from Zandvoort onwards as McLaren switched off all development, apparently cruising to both titles. Obviously, the constructors’ was sealed up long ago but Verstappen’s flurry of victories since they found a way to engineer-in some front end on the RB21 disturbed what had looked like the season’s natural order.

Until that happened the hue was papaya with only occasional interruptions of blue on tracks at which the Red Bull was quick enough that Verstappen’s skills could make the winning difference: Suzuka, Imola. Even when he got pole at other tracks – Jeddah, Miami, Silverstone – it was a triumph of cockpit skills and new tyre grip masking the car’s shortfall to the McLaren’s super-flexibility; quick everywhere, super-fast when it was about controlling rear tyre temperatures. It would almost invariably triumph on race day regardless of any Verstappen qualifying heroics. Sometimes Norris would unlock the code better than Piastri, sometimes not.

“Norris blocked but if that was from the Max playbook, getting too late on the brakes was not”

But ever since Red Bull got onto a very fruitful front wing development curve it’s been a factor. It was still a little trickier to set-up, but fast enough to get Verstappen into regular contention. Around the treacherous wet Vegas track, Norris was on a very handy pole but that 0.3sec margin didn’t buy him any extra space to Verstappen right alongside him on the front row.

Although the track was now dry, it remained very cold. Drivers were being instructed by their engineers to do as many as five burn-outs to the grid. But Norris was distracted at this moment – by Verstappen hanging back. His burn-outs were not as thorough as Verstappen’s and even from the less grippy side of the grid the Red Bull got a better launch. Norris very smartly veered left to block but if that part was straight from the Verstappen playbook, getting too late then onto the brakes was not. As the McLaren ran wide, so Verstappen slipped easily by into the lead – and George Russell’s Mercedes also managed to grind by before they reached Turn 4.

This was par for the course for Russell and Mercedes in ’25; more consistent than the year before but without quite the same peaks. It controlled its tyre temperatures better than the year before but not as well as the McLaren. It had great traction but lacked the Red Bull’s high-speed downforce. On the two occasions where it was fully competitive – Montreal and Singapore – Russell took immaculate victories.

Back to Vegas: once Verstappen had got ahead he never looked back – other than to check his mirrors on his out-lap to see how close the undercutting Russell got to him. The answer: very close. But in caning his new tyres in the eight laps between his stop and Verstappen’s, Russell had damaged them and after being rebuffed once on Verstappen’s out-lap the Merc’s grip was spent. Verstappen pulled well clear and Norris overtook Russell with just 16 laps to go. The McLaren was 5sec behind but unable to close the gap to Verstappen. In fact in the last four laps Norris dropped dramatically off the pace as his race engineer guided him through where to lift and coast – for what turned out to be concern about the plank wear.

Piastri was similarly afflicted but because there was a broken sensor on his car it couldn’t be monitored. Post-race the planks on both McLarens were found to be around a hair’s breadth below the minimum permitted 9mm. Disqualifications swiftly followed, promoting Russell to an official second ahead of team-mate Kimi Antonelli. The latter’s was a remarkable drive from 17th on the grid, keeping up great pace on very old tyres, so that Piastri was unable to pass him. He’d stopped on the second lap to make the compulsory change of tyre compound and ran then to the end on what was effectively a zero-stop strategy.

“Verstappen pulled himself within a 12-point reach of Norris going into the season finale”

McLaren had no sooner finished apologising to its drivers for the Las Vegas disqualifications than it was doing so again in Qatar for a monumental strategic error which lost Piastri what had looked set to be a straightforward victory and left Norris back in fourth. Inevitably, the recipient of the McLaren debacle was Verstappen, who thereby pulled himself within a 12-point reach of Norris going into the season finale.

It had all looked so good for Piastri in Qatar, bouncing back into form after a difficult few races. After winning the sprint race unopposed from pole he proceeded to beat Norris to pole for the main event, the McLaren pair a quarter-second faster than second-row starters Verstappen and Russell. The complications were rooted in the Pirelli stipulation for this weekend of a maximum of 25 laps for any set of tyres, for safety reasons. With it being a 57-lap race, it was an enforced two-stop – and you couldn’t pit before lap seven without having to switch to the much slower three-stop.

So when there was a safety car on lap seven (for debris from a Nico Hülkenberg/Pierre Gasly collision) it locked the race into total uniformity. Except for McLaren. The strategists were all looking at laps seven and 32 as the crucial ones. The lap seven safety car ensured the strategy clicked into a non-variance lap-32 second stop for everyone, unless you chose to stay out on lap seven – which would be a crazy thing to do. Coming in then gave you one of your two pitstops for free, with zero time loss (as you’d be back onto the tail of the safety car after stopping). Yet McLaren kept both cars out, thereby incurring a theoretical 26sec penalty (the pitstop time loss to the field here at racing speed) to make up. Although McLaren had the fastest car here it wasn’t by anything like enough margin to overcome that.

With the safety car out early enough in the lap to give plenty of time for the strategists to consider choices, there was bemusement as the two McLarens continued, with Verstappen peeling off from between them to pit, followed by everyone else. Red Bull strategist Hannah Schmitz called her cars in. “Are you sure?” asked one of her team. “McLaren are staying out.” “Yes, I’m sure,” she replied. So was everyone else.

McLaren, however, with its collective mind focused on not disadvantaging one driver over another missed the bigger imperative of the moment.

“The misjudgement is something we will have to review internally,” said Andrea Stella after the race. “We’ll have to assess for instance whether there was a certain bias in the way we were thinking that led us as a group to think that not necessarily all cars would have pitted. There can be some biases in the way that you think.”

The bias he was referring to was the self-imposed restriction of equality of opportunity for each driver. If they’d brought both cars in, Norris would have been delayed exiting the pits by the other cars coming in and would probably have lost places at a track at which overtaking is difficult.

Nor was the McLaren pitwall figuring that everyone else would pit, as Stella explained. “The reason was we didn’t want to end up in traffic after the pitstop. But obviously everyone pitted and made our staying out incorrect. Because Verstappen was fast and the tyre deg low, our decision was significantly penalised. Oscar was in control of the race and deserved to win it and we lost Lando the podium as well.”

The McLarens made their first stops on laps 24 and 25. Everyone else made their second stops on lap 32 as their tyres reached the stipulated maximum. The McLarens made their second stops on laps 42 and 44. Piastri rejoined 15sec behind Verstappen with 13 laps left. Norris came out behind both Carlos Sainz’s Williams and Antonelli. The Mercedes was fast at the end of the straights and even with the help of DRS Norris could find no way by until, going into the final lap, Antonelli suffered a big twitch on the entry to Turn 9 and as he ran four wheels off the track on the exit, so Norris slipped by for the extra two points for fourth place.

The Las Vegas victory was Verstappen’s sixth of the season, drawing him level on wins with the McLaren drivers and now slotted between them in the points table – with just the Abu Dhabi season finale to go.

Those two disastrous races for McLaren at Vegas and Qatar as Verstappen’s rampage continued had been potentially catastrophic for the team but the maths still favoured Norris for the last weekend. Verstappen kept that pressure applied by scorching around the track to a comfortable pole position, ahead of Norris and Piastri. With the three title contenders filling the top grid slots, and the strategists on the McLaren and Red Bull pitwall considering the points permutations, the final race of the season got underway in the dusk of another desert night.

As everyone’s tyre blankets came off Red Bull was surprised to see that McLaren had fitted Piastri with hards. The medium was much the favoured tyre on which to start and hards on Piastri’s car made clear how McLaren planned to run this race: as a co-ordinated two-pronged campaign to ensure a McLaren driver took the title.

They maintained grid formation into Turn 1 but once Piastri had passed Norris on the first lap – into the fast Turn 9, with no resistance from Norris – then McLaren could prevent Verstappen from backing Norris into the pack. Not that it would necessarily have worked if he had – the track layout is now quite different to how it was when Lewis Hamilton had backed Nico Rosberg up in 2016. But this took that option off Verstappen’s menu. Norris meanwhile could give his tyres an easier time as he let his two rivals go and just gauged his pace back to the chasing Ferrari of Charles Leclerc.

Norris was unable to take advantage of his early pace though, as McLaren was forced to pit him early so as to fend off an undercut threat triggered by Russell. Verstappen and Piastri pulled away from the field as Norris fought his way through the midfield he’d not been able to clear because of the early stop. The last of these was Verstappen’s team-mate Yuki Tsunoda, having his last race for the team, and running long on a set of hards so as to be in place to delay Norris in just this situation. His weaving on the straight up to Turn 9 forced Norris off the track to complete the pass. But he was finally safely through. Needing only a third-place finish for the title, all he had to do from there was keep a wary eye out for the overachieving Leclerc.

When Ferrari switched Leclerc to a two-stop, so McLaren was obliged to cover him off again with Norris. Leclerc continued to charge hard but after a few laps his tyres had had enough, and Norris was secure again. Verstappen had already passed Piastri on track even before the latter made his pitstop. It had been an immaculate drive from the four-time title holder, but the fifth would have to wait as Norris became the 11th British F1 world champion.