2 weeks Ago
When it comes to fighting for a championship, is two better than one? It’s a question likely to be bubbling away at the back of McLaren team principal Andrea Stella’s mind this weekend. After a quickfire opening to the Formula 1 season comprising five grands prix in six weekends, the rough outline of the 2025 campaign is beginning to take shape. It would be easy to interpret this incomplete sketch as the early stages of McLaren domination.
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After all, the reigning constructors champion has the fastest car on the grid and leads the title table. It’s won four of five grands prix and taken three poles from five qualifying sessions. Oscar Piastri leads Lando Norris in one-two formation at the top of the championship standings.
But reality isn’t quite so simple. The Japan-Bahrain-Saudi Arabia triple-header painted a much more complex picture of a title fight that could be poised to twist and turn through the European season. Max Verstappen took two poles in three races.
He was quick enough to win defensively in Japan, and Norris has speculated that Verstappen had the pace for outright victory in Saudi Arabia but for the powerfully detrimental effect of dirty air around the high-speed street track. As a result the Dutchman is only 12 points off the title lead and just two points behind Norris. He’s done so despite Red Bull Racing’s yo-yoing form.
While his teammates have been able to score just two points in the same car, an exercise in sustained individual brilliance from Verstappen has been enough to confound McLaren several times already this season to keep himself in the hunt. There’s been no clearer example of his narrow path to the championship than his victory in Japan. A perfect pole lap ensured he capitalised from mistakes by both Norris and Piastri, and an error-free Sunday performance meant the faster Norris had no opportunity to break through.
But what was left unknown was whether Piastri, bottled behind Norris in third, could have been able to pressure the Dutchman in ways his teammate couldn’t after McLaren denied him the team order that would have given him a shot at challenging for the lead. It prompted Red Bull Racing principal Christian Horner to make a bizarre gibe at the expense of his opposite number at McLaren. “The problem they have is they have two drivers that are fighting for the drivers championship,” he said.
“I guess the difficulty they have is that they’ve made a bed where they’re going to let them race. “That’s the compromise that inevitably comes with that.” It reads as a borderline unhinged defence of his own team’s struggles to form a balanced two-car driver line-up for the last seven years — struggles that cost the team the constructors championship last season.
But this remarkable piece of spin also has a kernel of undeniable logic that might begin to trouble McLaren as the season continues. RED BULL RACING IS ALL-IN ON VERSTAPPEN Fast-forward to the end of the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, where despite disappointment about the penalty that cost Verstappen a shot at victory, Horner gave his team’s weekend a positive appraisal. “Good points, important points, today,” Horner told Sky Sports, “We’re only 12 points off the lead of the championship.
We’ve taken a few points out of Lando. Everything to play for.” Of course Red Bull Racing is nowhere near the top of the standings.
It’s third on the title table and already 99 points off the lead. By ‘we’ Horner means Verstappen, and he’s talking about the drivers title. Red Bull Racing is all-in on the Dutchman’s hopes not just by choice but also by necessity.
It’s the only title for which the team is really in contention. Second place was good damage limitation. It cost him only four points to the title lead because Piastri was moving from second to first on the table.
Meanwhile Norris’s underperformance meant the reigning champion is now actually a closer third place than he was before the race. Suddenly you can start to see the strength of Verstappen’s position relative to McLaren two-driver set-up. Piastri and Norris have been taking points off each other all season.
Verstappen, unmatched by his two teammates, has been free to score whatever his car’s maximum is every weekend. McLaren’s need to be even-handed potentially cost Piastri at least three points and perhaps as many as 10 points in Japan. And while the Australian’s spin in Melbourne ended up being more important to his result than the team’s initial refusal to allow him to race Norris for the lead, you could crudely argue that he wouldn’t have been pushing so hard that he ended up in the mud in the first place had he been leading.
Rather than his current 10-point lead, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which Piastri’s advantage could have been more than twice as big. Of course there’s no world in which McLaren would be picking winners so early in the season, but it serves to illustrate the opening its competitive line-up has created for Verstappen to keep himself in title contention. HISTORY DEMONSTRATES DANGER It wouldn’t be the first time McLaren faced a singular threat with two competitive drivers and stumbled.
In 2007 the team seemed guaranteed to storm to both championships, with reigning two-time champion Fernando Alonso joining just as Woking peaked in competitiveness. But then rookie Lewis Hamilton turned out to be a match for the Spaniard and things started getting complicated. The two spent the season splitting wins and taking points off each other, keeping Kimi Räikkönen in the slower Ferrari in the frame.
Critical retirements in the antepenultimate and penultimate races of the season — Alonso crashed out in Japan, Hamilton beached himself in China — sent the title to an all-or-nothing showdown in Brazil, where Räikkönen sealed the deal with a victory. A McLaren driver had led the title standings after 15 of the 17 rounds that season, and the McLaren team would have won the constructors title had it not been thrown out of the championship over the so-called spygate intellectual property scandal. Of course there are clear differences between 2007 and today.
McLaren then was badly roiled by internal politics so severe that Alonso quit the team at the end of the season, the rivalry between him and Hamilton — and the animosity between him and team boss Ron Dennis — so toxic that him leaving was the only thing that prevented a complete implosion. The McLaren of 2025 won’t have such dramatic issues, with team principal Andrea Stella having worked hard to instil in his long-term drivers a team-first approach. “We talk about this every Thursday and every Sunday of every single race weekend,” he said in Japan.
“We are here, first of all, to beat the other teams and put McLaren in a very strong position. “When McLaren is in a strong position, then it’s the best position for the two drivers to pursue their aspirations. This is very clear to the team, very clear to the drivers.
“Before it becomes internal business only, I think there’s quite a lot of work to do to clear some of the competitors.” He also dismissed the long-term threat of Verstappen’s individual brilliance in a car that shouldn’t be capable of regular wins. “I think definitely the most important condition to pursue both championships is having the best car,” he said.
“I think Max at the moment is somehow making the difference himself, but it’s very difficult to keep up for 24 events in a season if you don’t have the best car.” JUNE’S TICKING TIME BOMB But Red Bull Racing thinks that could change in a matter of weeks, swinging the balance of power back in Verstappen’s favour. From June’s Spanish Grand Prix, round 9 of 24, the FIA it will apply a stricter threshold when testing the flexibility of front wings.
Wings that flex help to balance the car through the range of corner speeds, a key challenge in the ground-effect era. Bodywork flexibility emerged as a key battleground last season, with McLaren believed to be at the forefront of exploiting the regulatory loophole. Despite mastering this dark art in previous eras, Red Bull Racing has struggled to follow.
Milton Keynes has hinted several times this season that it sees the June clampdown as a potential turning point that could bring McLaren back into its clutches. “I think there’s an unknown as to how it will affect the different cars,” Horner said. “You can see that the operating window of these cars is very, very narrow.
“That front wing change is quite a significant one, so it will be interesting to see how and who it affects. There are no guarantees.” So the goal is clear: stay in the mix for three more rounds and then hope the field is reset in Spain.
And while that sounds far too late in the season to have a meaningful impact, consider this second historical parallel. Red Bull Racing being third and 99 points off the title is exactly the same position — down to the point — that McLaren was in after the same number of races last year. McLaren’s deficit to Red Bull Racing peaked at 115 points after the Miami Grand Prix before gradually and then rapidly coming down until it hit the lead in Azerbaijan on the way to winning the constructors championship.
The Spanish Grand Prix was the last race the team won before a damaging 10-race victory drought. Spain this year happens to coincide with the new technical directive coming into force. Of course McLaren’s 2024 constructors title triumph had no impact on the drivers championship, which Verstappen still won at a canter by 63 points.
But remember that almost all that advantage was built up early in the season — in fact Verstappen’s lead was exactly 63 points after winning in Spain. Even after the first five rounds his advantage was way bigger, at 34 points over the highest placed non-RBR driver. After five rounds this year Piastri is just 12 points ahead of Verstappen.
So the strategy is clear. If Verstappen can prevent his points deficit from blowing out between now and Barcelona — if Piastri and Norris keep pinching points from each other — he’ll be comfortably within striking distance when the playing field is levelled. McLAREN DENIES VULNERABILITY But whether McLaren really is vulnerable to the FIA’s technical directive is a big question mark.
Teams have had months to prepare for it, and during the pre-season Stella denied he had any concerns about being pegged back. “No headache at all,” he told Sky Sports. “There will be a small adjustment required from race 9” If it really were relying so heavily on this aero elasticity, surely it would have been caught out in China, when the FIA suddenly clamped down on flexing rear wings with just a few days notice.
During testing Red Bull Racing had been openly suggesting McLaren was operating outside the rules governing rear-wing flexibility, and there’d been speculation it could have its advantage seriously trimmed as a result. But then Piastri dominated the Chinese Grand Prix, quashing that theory definitively. In fact Red Bull Racing’s suspicions have begun to look like competitive paranoia.
There was the unusual claim late last year that McLaren was keeping its tyres cool by illegally pumping them with water, an allegation unsupported by a subsequent FIA inquiry. Then in Japan Max Verstappen referenced a video retweeted by his father Jos suggesting McLaren was still breaking the rules around rear wing flexibility. No action has eventuated.
We won’t find out whether Red Bull Racing’s latest suspicion proves to be true. Until then the team will have to hope Piastri and Norris keep taking points off each other to help keep Verstappen cling to his place in the title fight. Until then it has to hope one really is better than two.
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