Max is back in the 2025 championship: F1 GP reports

Max Verstappen’s hopes were not high for his home track of Zandvoort. It’s exactly the sort of medium-speed, long-corner layout which so rewards the McLaren and hurts the Red Bull. What the Red Bull needs are low-downforce tracks like Monza and Baku where its excellent aero efficiency at low wing levels allows it to compete. So this was a very interesting three-race sequence from a Red Bull perspective.

The team long ago released any claim on the 2025 championship, given the unerring dominance of McLaren. The Red Bull RB21 has been no match for the McLaren MCL39 over the full range of circuits. But recently there have been signs of progress. It’s not been so much about new developments (everyone has pretty much switched those off for 2025 as they concentrate on the cars of ’26), as a better understanding of what they have.

Red Bull’s simulation tools have not been serving them too well in the last couple of seasons. It’s become normal for the car to hit the track on Friday horribly ill-balanced and for lots of midnight oil to be burned by the simulator drivers to give something more workable for the rest of the weekend. Max Verstappen’s radioed exasperation with the car has become a regular Friday feature.

But there’s been a subtle change of emphasis under new team boss Laurent Mekies’ regime. “The engineers are listening more to the driver,” Helmut Marko said in Monza. “If you have such a fast and experienced driver I think it’s the right way. He has to drive it… The whole technical team is more open to discussing things and they are not blindly taking what the simulation says… it’s more based on data [at the track] than whatever the simulation is showing you. It’s more about how the experience of Max and the engineers make a car that is predictable and driveable.”

There was no great revelation as the cars first hit the track at Zandvoort – McLaren’s Lando Norris was way ahead of everyone else and Verstappen spent his Friday changing front ride height, torsion bars and ballast placement to get around the car’s inherent dislike of long corners. But Max was appreciative of the change in emphasis in the process: “Previously we’ve been doing quite extreme changes, which shows that we were not in control,” commented Max in Monza. “We were not fully understanding what to do. With [team boss] Laurent [Mekies] having an engineering background, he’s asking the right questions to the engineers – common sense questions – so I think that works really well. Already we have made a step forward in Zandvoort.”

The changes that they brought to the car at least placed it on a par with Ferrari and Mercedes – good enough for Verstappen to qualify it third, a quarter-second behind the two McLarens, with Oscar Piastri on pole a few hundredths ahead of Norris.

If it was only about pace McLaren was going to be long-gone – and indeed that’s how it was for Piastri as he converted pole into the lead and disappeared for the rest of the afternoon, perfectly managing the three safety car restarts. But Norris had a Verstappen-with-a-plan to contend with. With nothing to lose, Max opted to start on the soft tyres with their better traction off the line but apparently committing him to a theoretically slower two-stop, in the certain knowledge that McLaren would be obliged to start on the medium so as to cover the one and two-stop possibilities.

At the start Verstappen hung on around Norris’s outside through Tarzan and was still there as they approached the quick right-handed kink of Turn 2. As the Red Bull’s outside wheels caught the sand which had blown onto the track it began what looked to be a wild high-speed spin but Verstappen somehow caught it and in tank-slapping his way towards Turn 3 still somehow on the track and going forwards he passed Norris! It was an extraordinary moment which said everything about not only his amazing gift but also how free he feels in his racing without a title fight to worry about.

“With Mekies, he’s asking the right questions to the engineers”

It was only a matter of time before Norris, in the faster car and on more durable tyres was able to repass – and that moment came on lap nine, the McLaren going around the Red Bull’s outside through Tarzan. By this time Piastri was over 4sec up the road and most of the rest of Norris’s afternoon was about trying to eat into that gap without taking too much from the tyres. But Piastri was on his game and even though the restarts allowed Norris hope, he was never able to challenge. It looked like he was going to lose a further seven points to Piastri in the championship battle but actually fate had other ideas in store. A broken oil pipe on Norris’s car seven laps from the end saw him pull to the side with the rear of the McLaren ablaze. He was now 34 points behind the victorious Piastri with just nine races left.

All of which promoted Verstappen up to a distant second place on a track ill-suited to the car. Keeping Verstappen honest was the remarkable rookie Isack Hadjar, who took his first podium after qualifying the Racing Bulls car on the second row ahead of the Mercs and Ferraris. Behind him, Lewis Hamilton crashed out his Ferrari in damp conditions, Charles Leclerc scraped along the side of George Russell in passing at the chicane, damaging the Mercedes. Kimi Antonelli then took up Merc’s challenge but in attempting to pass Leclerc into the banked Turn 3 got it all wrong and hit the Ferrari into retirement.

“It was F1’s fastest ever race-winning average at 155.791mph”

Moving onto Monza a week later Red Bull had genuine hope. The car was competitive with everyone running their low wings and this time – unlike in 2024 – Red Bull had a specific Monza wing rather than simply a trimmed version of the standard low-downforce wing. It had been in development since before the season. But this was in combination with a generously proportioned front wing area. Ordinarily this combination might have been expected to make for entry instability – and on Friday Verstappen did suffer a big moment into the Lesmos as he made a new tyre run – but he and the team worked away to tame the worst effects of that while still retaining the big front wing. It was giving Verstappen more confidence in attacking the chicanes, getting more of the rotation through steering than from the rear of the car. For qualifying they had trimmed the rear wing even further and this in addition to further mechanical changes brought the car fully into its sweet spot. Verstappen responded with pole position, 0.077sec faster than Norris, in the process setting the fastest average speed for a single lap in F1 history at 164.466mph. Piastri shared the second row with Leclerc’s Ferrari.

The opening laps were thrilling as Norris – driving partly on the grass to keep momentum on Verstappen’s inside as they raced towards the first chicane – forced the Red Bull driver to take the escape apron at the first apex. Verstappen rejoined the track leading but was instructed by his team to hand the place back, which he did at the end of the lap. Piastri meanwhile was engaged in a major wheel-to-wheel dice with Leclerc, the Ferrari getting ahead out of the first turn, but Piastri going around the outside of the first Lesmo to reclaim third, only for Leclerc to grab the place back again out of the first chicane on the next lap. Piastri took the place definitively a couple of laps later.

This was all happening a few hundred metres behind the ongoing Norris-Verstappen dice and on the fourth lap the Red Bull driver put a straight DRS pass on the McLaren to retake the lead. From there he simply pulled himself out of reach, extending the gap by around 0.3sec each lap. The Red Bull was simply quicker and Norris’s radio was soon suggesting the reason why: his front-left tyre was graining. “It’s not really a big problem,” he radioed. “It’s just slow.”

Driving to the artificial grip limit imposed by the graining meant he was unable to stay with the Red Bull, the bigger front wing of which was protecting the front tyres just fine. Verstappen got himself well out of undercut range and was on his way to victory and the focus became the race between the McLarens, as Piastri steadily caught his team-mate.

Eventually the extra load that front wing had been feeding into Verstappen’s left-front saw it begin to blister. But he was 6sec clear by then and had ample time to make his pitstop without any threat from the McLarens.

Hoping for a safety car, McLaren kept both cars out for as long as possible. Leclerc pitted before them and on new tyres was soon lapping half-a-second or more faster than the yet-to-stop McLarens. But he was still several seconds away from being an undercut threat as McLaren chose to bring Piastri in first.

Piastri’s stop was routine but a lap later Norris’s was not. There was a 3sec delay on the front-left wheel – enough for Piastri to jump ahead as Norris rejoined. An awkward radio conversation between Piastri and the pitwall ensued as he was asked to give the place back to his team-mate. He reluctantly agreed to do so five laps from the end. Although they were then free to race again, they were too closely matched for an overtake to be feasible. Verstappen-Norris-Piastri was the order at the flag. It was F1’s fastest ever race-winning average at 155.791mph.

Verstappen’s first win since Imola nine races earlier represented a great victory for the new Mekies-era team but the boss wasn’t so sure how it might translate into Baku, one of the few tracks on which Verstappen had never won. “We had a great Monza,” he said, “but Monza is so specific it was not clear how much of that progress we could bring to Baku. Which is also very specific with all low-speed corners… but recently we do seem to have unlocked something at least on slow corners.”

After again spending Friday fine-tuning the car around a skinny rear and ample front wing Verstappen unleashed the full potential on Saturday – and it was good enough to give him a second consecutive pole. But this was a volatile qualifying session as the gusting winds and damp track played their part in a record six red flags. In Q3 Leclerc and Piastri put their cars in the wall without having set a time. Piastri’s crash came after only Carlos Sainz’s Williams and the Racing Bulls of Liam Lawson and Isack Hadjar had set a time and for a while as the rain came down it looked like that could be the grid. But the drizzle had stopped with 3min of the session remaining. McLaren played safe by sending Norris out at the head of the queue, wanting to guard against him suffering yellow or red flags. Red Bull chose to send their two cars out last.

It meant that Norris was trying to set a time on a recently dampened track while Verstappen had the advantage of the six cars ahead of him having at least partially dried the line. Red Bull’s high-risk/high-reward strategy paid off as Verstappen set a resounding pole, 0.5sec faster than Sainz’s benchmark. But the Williams driver retained second place ahead of Lawson. Norris clouted his right-rear against a barrier on the way to seventh-fastest time. Of his error Norris said of the McLaren, “On these low-downforce tracks it’s not an easy car to drive.” The confidence-boosting feel Verstappen was getting from the Red Bull in this format played its part in allowing him to express his genius.

“It was the first time Piastri appeared to be feeling pressure”

In stark contrast to qualifying, the race was almost incident-free. Almost. Piastri capped his terrible weekend by first of all anticipating the start, then triggering the McLaren’s anti-stall as he pulled up, falling to last – then crashing into the barriers again, this time at Turn 5 on the opening lap as he tried to quickly make up the places he’d lost. It was the first time this season that Piastri appeared to be feeling the pressure of leading the championship.

Once the safety car for the Piastri incident came in, Verstappen – starting on the hard tyre – disappeared into the distance. He was helped in this by Sainz and Lawson effectively forming a blockage for any potentially fast cars. A DRS train of cars formed behind Lawson comprising the two Mercedes of Kimi Antonelli and George Russell, Yuki Tsunoda’s Red Bull, Leclerc, Norris and Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari. Aside from a Tsunoda-Russell dice, it remained this way throughout the opening stint as Verstappen pulled out 0.5sec or more each lap even as he concentrated on just giving his tyres an easier time.

The thinking behind the unusual choice for a pole-sitter of starting on the hards was very much Verstappen’s – and in the new spirit of being more guided by its driver, he got his wish. Despite not having driven on the hard tyre at any point in the weekend pre-race. “The thinking wasn’t about how we believed the hard might compare to the medium,” explained Mekies, “but it was in the expectation of safety cars and red flags. We wanted to be able to drive to whenever the safety car came. Max pushed for this. It came with other risks but Max was convincing in explaining he could deal with those risks.” The short distance down to Turn 1 and the fact that it was Sainz – surely not willing to risk a massive result for Williams and blowing the opportunity of a front row start – probably also played into Verstappen’s assessment of the risk of using the less accelerative tyre.

So low was the degradation rate of the hard that Verstappen was able to wait until everyone else had pitted before coming in for his mediums just 11 laps from the end.

Russell also started on the hards and used them to overcut his way past his medium-starting team-mate, Lawson and Sainz for second, with Sainz retaining third. Norris never broke free of the DRS train, not helped by another pitstop delay, and finished seventh.

“We’re working hard at understanding what is limiting us with this car,” said Mekies, “but I don’t know how this will translate at higher-downforce, higher-tempera