Verstappen nears historic F1 comeback - US GP takeaways

Max Verstappen took another step towards a historic comeback with a comfortable win in the United States that put more pressure on Formula 1 rivals Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris.

With his double win in Austin, the Red Bull driver is now on the verge of not needing his McLaren rivals to falter to have a mathematical shot at a championship that just a few races ago seemed nothing but a pipe dream.

McLaren, meanwhile, keeps doing its best to be as fair as possible to its drivers, but will that end up costing it?

Here’s a look at the main topics from the Austin weekend.

Verstappen is closing in on history

Sixty-four points in four grand prix weekends. That’s how many points Verstappen has erased from his gap to Piastri after his victory in the US Grand Prix.

Piastri said after the Austin race that his advantage had been reduced “a little bit”, but the reality is that 64 points in four weekends sounds like an almost unprecedented feat.

Just a few weekends ago, Verstappen looked completely out of the championship fight, and betting on him would have almost labelled you as delusional.

But as Red Bull team boss Laurent Mekies pointed out after Sunday, F1 might be watching history in the making.

Piastri’s 40-point advantage over Verstappen is still massive considering there are five races remaining, but few would be willing to bet against the Dutchman having witnessed his last four race weekends.

Verstappen is not favourite by any stretch of the imagination, but at this point the argument that McLaren won’t have many ‘off’ weekends has lost almost all weight.

It now appears that returning to winning ways is not just a matter of getting everything right or arriving at a track that suits its car. For whatever reason, McLaren now looks second-best to Verstappen’s Red Bull.

Unless there’s a change in the current trend, McLaren’s hope of having Piastri or Norris taking the crown relies mainly on, not beating Verstappen, but on not allowing him to eat too much into their advantage in the five remaining rounds.

To put the situation in perspective, if Verstappen wins again in Mexico and Piastri is third, then the Red Bull driver won’t depend on any of his rivals’ results in the remaining races to win the title.

Winning the next five races sounds like a big ask for Verstappen, and he needs every weekend to be perfect, but in nearly all of the 19 races so far, he has been anything but.

McLaren is playing a risky game

If McLaren somehow ends up losing the drivers’ title, it will have to find consolation in knowing that it at least tried everything in its hand to be as fair as possible to its drivers.

It will be up to McLaren itself to decide whether that’s enough, although one can imagine that the outside world won’t find it to be a suitable replacement for a title that was almost a given just a few weeks ago.

On the one hand, Piastri and Norris are still in prime position to secure the crown, a result that would somewhat validate McLaren’s approach.

On the other, however, it feels like Verstappen becoming a real threat is also the result of the Woking squad’s attempts at controlling situations that often seem impossible to control.

Asking Piastri to give up second to Norris at Monza is still one of the most noticeable examples of that. Making Norris pay ‘consequences’ for his Singapore incident with Piastri looked like another.

But while McLaren’s intentions are commendable, it is still somewhat bizarre that it keeps hurting one of its drivers in the name of fairness when Verstappen is becoming a bigger threat every weekend.

In Austin, those ‘consequences’ are believed to have hindered Norris’s chances of grabbing sprint pole, although in reality there is no way to know what the end result would have been.

Regardless, with Verstappen now 40 points behind Piastri and 26 behind Norris, McLaren might be playing with fire in making its drivers pay for their or the team’s mistakes, no matter how small the punishment is.

Should Verstappen keep outscoring his rivals in Mexico, McLaren may need to start rethinking its approach or face the fact the it might end up costing its drivers the title.

Hamilton’s unwanted record amid Ferrari progress

Even thought the team showed progress in Austin, Lewis Hamilton left the American track still without a podium finish to his name as a Ferrari racer.

The seven-time champion now has the dubious record of being the Ferrari driver with the most races without a podium finish since joining the team at 19, one more than Didier Pironi.

Unwanted statistics aside, Hamilton looked more at ease at the wheel of the car and was a closer match to Charles Leclerc for most of the weekend, even though the Monegasque was the stronger man on Sunday.

Ferrari’s more encouraging weekend still saw the Scuderia lose ground to Red Bull in the standings, the Milton Keynes squad now just three points behind.

Although the Maranello squad fared better, its rollercoaster of a season suggests it still needs to find a lot more consistency to see Austin as real progress.

The US GP weekend was also a stark reminder of where Ferrari was a year ago, having scored a dominant 1-2 at COTA.

Ferrari returns to Mexico a year on from its last victory, still searching for the consistency to make promising weekends count.

Austin hinted at steps forward, but the real test is whether the team can finally string them together to avoid dropping behind Red Bull and finish the season as fourth best.

Processional races are now the norm

On a weekend during which F1 celebrated a massive deal with Apple to become the US’s broadcaster from next year, highlighting the series’ growth in popularity in America, it was somewhat ironic that Sunday’s race offered so little in terms of spectacle.

Unfortunately, that’s now a trend, and no matter how much Pirelli has tried to spice up strategies, one-stoppers without much changing at the front continue to be the norm.

Leclerc tried something different by starting on soft tyres, but the end result was the same once the pitstop cycles were completed.

As the end of the current rules era, teams have learned how to manage their tyres too well.

That, added to compounds that are too hard, has led to races with very low degradation in which there’s really no room for strategy.

The gaps between the cars are also not big enough to allow for regular overtaking, even with DRS.

“At the moment it’s like a race to Turn 1,” said George Russell after the race. “Qualifying is so important. There’s no tyre deg at the moment, so overtaking is very challenging.

“If I came out of Turn 1 in P4, I think I’d have finished P4. If I came out in P3 I think I’d have finished P3, so it’s just how it is at the moment.”

The situation is very unlikely to change in the remaining races, which is a shame considering the title fight could turn out to be epic.

Penalties and big fines

There were two significant stories hours after the US Grand Prix had finished as Carlos Sainz was hit with a penalty and Red Bull with a massive fine for a cheeky incident.

Sainz undid his strong weekend with an overoptimistic dive on Kimi Antonelli at Turn 15 which sent the Mercedes into a spin and forced the Spaniard’s retirement on the spot.

As a result, the Williams driver not only missed the chance of adding more points to his tally, but compromised his Mexican GP, where he will have to serve a five-place grid drop.

Red Bull’s €50,000 fine – half of it suspended – related to its attempt to remove the tape marking Norris’s grid position.

The tape, authorised by the FIA at the start of the season, served as a visual aid for the McLaren driver to know where to line up on the grid.

Red Bull’s interference was not primarily penalised for tampering with the tape itself but for ignoring marshal instructions and breaching safety protocols by entering a restricted gate well near the grid.