hot take: verstappen wouldn't be in the WDC fight if mclaren was competent
a 104-point gap is down to 40 with five races left, and max verstappen's talent is only half of the explanation.
this season, we’ve seen one of the greatest comebacks in the history of formula one. max verstappen, after falling 104 points behind thanks to (among other things) a car that simply wasn’t fast enough, is now just 26 points behind second-place lando norris and 40 behind championship leader oscar piastri. so how exactly did a gap that big shrink to this?
lando won the first race in melbourne while being hunted by verstappen for the last few laps. not only was it norris’ first time leading the world drivers’ championship, it also ended max’s unmatched record of 1,029 consecutive days at the top. after mclaren’s big improvement in the second half of 2024, we expected that norris and piastri (obviously worse than verstappen) finally had a car that could close the gap for them.
it helped that red bull dropped off at the same time. ever since adrian newey, their chief technical officer, quit the milton keynes outfit to join lawrence stroll and fernando alonso at aston martin, red bull hasn’t been the best team. the continuous red bull 1-2s of 2023 are gone, and ferrari, mercedes and most notably mclaren have been picking up the wins and podiums instead.
for the first 15 races this year, all of us thought the championship would come down to piastri and norris. two decent drivers in the dominant car had to be the only contenders, right? piastri took the lead in jeddah, five races in, and since then we’ve watched a mediocre battle between the two, mostly nullified by team orders and the greatly resented “papaya rules”.
this is where the incompetence comes in. norris has 3 DNFs this year (montreal, zandvoort and the austin sprint) and piastri has 2 (baku and the austin sprint). in montreal, lando drove into the back of his own teammate. at zandvoort, his car broke down while he was running P2. in baku, oscar put it in the wall on the first lap. in austin, they went out together at turn 1 of the sprint. and at monza, where max took pole and won by 19 seconds, mclaren’s big moment was a slow pit stop for norris followed by an order for piastri to hand P2 back.
max, meanwhile, has taken everything on offer. he finished 2nd in melbourne, jeddah, montreal, zandvoort and marina bay. he won at suzuka, imola, monza, baku and, most recently, austin. he has more pole positions than either mclaren driver and, after austin, is tied with norris on 5 wins. that’s how you maximize your points (see what i did there?) and turn an impossible 104-point gap into a measly 40 with 5 races and 2 sprints to go.
this weekend, the travelling circus of formula one heads to mexico. the most successful driver ever there just so happens to be (you guessed it) max verstappen, who won in CDMX in 2017, 2018, 2021, 2022 and 2023. neither norris nor piastri has ever won in mexico, and lando has only a single podium there.
can verstappen close the gap even more on sunday? will we get another mclaren double DNF like we did in texas? we can’t know yet, but we do know that however far ahead of the pack the papaya-orange mclarens are, the dutch lion isn’t far behind.