Norris's champion-worthy drive can't outshine Verstappen - Sao Paulo GP takeaways

Interlagos once again delivered one of the most revealing weekends of the 2025 season, one that said as much about where the championship is heading.

Lando Norris emerged with another win, strengthening his case as the driver most likely to be crowned 2025 world champion, but behind the result lay a series of storylines that painted a far more complex picture.

McLaren’s dominance wasn’t quite as absolute as the result suggests, with Max Verstappen’s pitlane recovery reminding everyone that he is not ready to give up despite an increasing points gap.

Elsewhere, Formula 1’s lingering officiating issues resurfaced after Oscar Piastri’s controversial penalty, fuelling frustration that the championship is losing sight of what true racing should look like.

Here’s what we learned from the Sao Paulo GP weekend.

Norris is now looking like a champion

Back-to-back wins in Mexico and Brazil have transformed Norris from a championship challenger into the driver who suddenly looks most like the 2025 world champion in waiting.

The Briton has been the strongest McLaren driver for a while now, eating into Piastri’s lead, but it has been the past two race weekends that have made Norris look almost unstoppable.

Norris has hit a vein of form that recalls the Verstappen dominance of previous years – calm under pressure, ruthless in execution, and devastatingly quick when it matters.

His win in Brazil, secured from pole after controlling the pace from the front, underlined a driver finally operating at complete ease with his machinery.

McLaren appears to have finally stabilised the MCL39’s balance issues, giving Norris a car he can lean on in qualifying and trust in race trim – and he’s making it count.

The contrast with Oscar Piastri, now 24 points behind after another scrappy weekend at Interlagos, adds to the sense that Norris has taken control, not only of the championship fight, but of the intra-team rivalry.

Norris’s performances are now carrying the authority of a driver in complete control, and his growing assurance over race management marks a step change from his earlier-season frustrations.

In contrast, Piastri has lost his edge.

Once a championship favourite, Piastri has now gone six weekends without a podium finish, which sounds almost unacceptable.

Since the Italian GP team orders swap, the Australian has not been the same driver, and with just three races to go, it’s hard to imagine him turning the situation around.

His points advantage is by no means any guarantee, but after Mexico and Brazil, Norris looks less like a challenger and more like the inevitable champion.

But McLaren can consider itself lucky

Norris may have left Interlagos with another commanding victory, but beneath the surface, his win owed at least partially to circumstance, not least Max Verstappen’s enforced start from the pitlane.

On pure pace, Red Bull’s recovery from a disastrous qualifying to a front-running threat was another reminder — not that anyone needed it — that Verstappen remains the benchmark.

Granted, the pitlane start was mainly Red Bull’s own making after a set-up gamble made his car undriveable and left Verstappen down in 16th in qualifying.

Still, his race performance was extraordinary. Once unleashed after breaking parc fermé rules to overhaul the set-up, the RB21 was transformed in Verstappen’s hands.

After having to pit very early due to a slow puncture, Verstappen scythed through the field, his pace relentless.

His race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase was spot on when he said Verstappen’s had been a race-winning drive.

Only Red Bull’s late decision to pit again for softs, fearing the mediums wouldn’t last, allowed Norris to relax, but the Briton admitted afterwards that had Verstappen started anywhere near the front, he wouldn’t have been able to respond.

It’s hard to disagree. The Red Bull’s pace in race trim was ominous, and Verstappen’s recovery drive to third – less than 12 seconds off the win – was arguably the performance of the weekend.

For all of Norris’s control and composure, his second successive win came with an asterisk: Verstappen’s pitlane start spared him a duel that might have rewritten the story of the race.

Stewarding risks ruining F1 racing

Piastri’s 10-second penalty for his first-lap collision with Kimi Antonelli in Brazil summed up the dispiriting state of Formula 1 racing currently.

What should have been seen just like a bold, opportunistic move at the restart became yet another flashpoint in the never-ending debate over how far drivers are allowed to race.

Piastri’s lunge up the inside of Antonelli into the Senna Esses wasn’t reckless by any stretch of the imagination; it was the kind of split-second gamble that defines racing itself.

The McLaren driver anticipated the restart better than those ahead and saw a gap that was always going to close.

Contact was somewhat inevitable given there were three cars side-by-side, but so was the spectacle, at least until the stewards stepped in.

The 10-second penalty destroyed his race, dropping him behind both Mercedes and Verstappen.

While Piastri didn’t appear to have the pace of his team-mate or Verstappen, it robbed him of a much-needed podium finish.

The problem isn’t this one decision alone, but the pattern of decisions that’s getting rid of the elements that make racing compelling in the first place.

Piastri’s penalty was the latest reminder that F1 is losing touch with its own essence, increasingly becoming a championship governed by risk aversion rather than racing instinct.

Antonelli is becoming the driver Mercedes hoped for

Antonelli’s second place in Brazil, which came after his most consistent run of solid performances in his rookie season, felt like the moment Mercedes’ great gamble finally began to pay off.

After flashes of raw speed earlier in the year, Interlagos felt like the first weekend where the 19-year-old delivered a complete performance: fast, composed, and responding under pressure, from Verstappen no less.

The Italian had been a pretty close match to Russell in recent races, but at Interlagos, he had the measure of the Briton most of the weekend, qualifying and finishing second in both the sprint and the race.

Sunday’s was the kind of drive that justified Mercedes’ faith in promoting him straight into Formula 1 and might have marked the arrival of the driver Toto Wolff believed they were getting all along.

Antonelli was lucky that Verstappen started from the pitlane, and that Piastri was eliminated from podium contention, but his calm execution showed the kind of promise that will give Mercedes more hope that it has made the right decision.

Hamilton is living a nightmare

There’s trouble at Ferrari, with company president John Elkann swiping at his drivers’ despair following a bruising chapter at Interlagos, telling Hamilton and Leclerc to “talk less”

Hamilton’s own words — that he is ‘living a nightmare’ — have come to define his first season at Ferrari, and Brazil only deepened the torment.

Having qualified 13th, Hamilton put himself in the difficult position of having to fight through the midfield, and the end result was an incident in which he not only lost his front wing, but for which he was also penalised.

After that, having damaged his car’s floor, he languished at the back of the field for 35 laps before Ferrari put an end to his misery and asked him to retire.

“It’s a nightmare. I’ve been living it for a while,” Hamilton told Sky after the race. “The flip between the dream of driving for this amazing team and then the nightmare of the results that we’ve had. The ups and downs. It’s challenging.”

Ferrari arrived in Brazil second in the standings and left down in fourth behind both Mercedes and what’s essentially a one-driver team in Red Bull.

On Monday, Elkann intervened in an apparent reprimand over the defeatist comments. “It is certainly important that our drivers focus on their driving and talk less,” he said.

“There are still important races left, and it is not impossible to achieve second place [in the constructors’ championship]… We need drivers who do not think about themselves, but who think about Ferrari.”