Has McLaren’s Austin GP sprint fiasco really made Verstappen a genuine F1 title contender?

The elephant in the room as Max Verstappen digested his sprint race victory in Austin was that it represented a net gain of just eight points in his favour with six grands prix to go in the 2025 Formula 1 season. That was enough to excite the commentariat but not Verstappen himself.

“The overall pace throughout the race, I expected it to be a little bit better,” he said. “So that’s something we need to work on, especially if the McLarens are not out on lap one tomorrow. I do think that if they would have raced today, it would have been very tough to keep them behind.”

Verstappen demands as much from his team as he does of himself, hence he felt he needed to make it explicit that he might not have been in that position had both McLaren drivers not been eliminated at Turn 1 on the opening lap. Max spent much of the remainder of the race effing and blinding about his car’s behaviour.

Complaining is a vital part of every racing driver’s skill set, but Verstappen sees everything: his capacity to execute big-picture thinking while wringing a car’s neck is part of what makes him a multiple world champion.

He will be acutely aware that, while the first-lap carambolage which left the papaya pugilists facing in opposite directions was a gift, he’s still 33 points behind Lando Norris, 55 off Oscar Piastri.

That’s why Verstappen isn’t getting carried away with the Austin sprint result. He might not have been wangling the numbers with a calculator in the cockpit, but he has a nose for a gap.

The fact is that if Verstappen wins every single one of the remaining sprints and grands prix, and Piastri finishes second in all of them, Piastri would still win the world championship by 458 points to 447. Were this to eventuate, Max might have cause to rue his oafish behaviour in the Spanish Grand Prix, where he arguably left 11 points on the table.

So the question Max is likely asking himself concerns whether his car, and circumstances, can combine for the necessary victories to fall his way while further misfortune befalls the McLaren drivers. Anyone who has followed a struggling sports team – for instance one faced with league relegation – or even a successful one with a narrow shot at title glory will be familiar with the sinking feeling associated by such calculations.

Having to win every remaining match while your rivals need to lose is an unfavourable situation to be in, since the outcome relies on factors outside your hands. Hence Verstappen’s pointed exhortations, which for all that they may seem directed at nobody in particular are intended for digestion by his Red Bull team.

“I take it. We take the points. It’s positive,” he said. “And now we just need to look ahead, you know, how we can improve a little bit the pace.”

Verstappen’s latest result is yet another in which he has maximised the potential of his car on days his title rivals have not. While this is not the title slam-dunk some have interpreted it to be, it heaps further pressure on McLaren and its policy of maintaining parity between its drivers.

Racing incidents are the sum of many small contributory factors, and it is the job of the stewards to determine whether any one driver is “wholly or predominantly to blame”. McLaren’s leaders decided Nico Hulkenberg was the villain in this case, Zak Brown suggesting he had “whacked” Piastri and Norris – terminology more suggestive of a gangland killing than a first-corner shunt.

Nico Hulkenberg, Sauber, Lando Norris, McLaren, Oscar Piastri, McLaren, Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin Racing crash

Photo by: Mark Thompson / Getty Images

Team principal Andrea Stella, meanwhile, without mentioning Hulkenberg by name, lamented “experienced drivers” not acting with “more prudence”. 

This is spurious cant. Karting-style cut-backs such as the one Piastri attempted at Turn 1, with a view to getting back past Norris further down the line, may work at other circuits but never at COTA on the opening lap, where there is always going to be at least one other car aiming to occupy that space.

In this case there were two, those of Hulkenberg and Fernando Alonso. Had Piastri been less focused on Norris in the moment, he might have noticed their rapid arrival into the space he was planning to occupy.

This “how dare they be there” outlook is rather disrespectful to other competitors. Norris’s slow getaway, and subsequent dive into Turn 1, along with Piastri’s failure to consider that other cars were almost certain to be claiming the space he was planning to cut back into, were contributory factors to the accident. Hence the stewards declared “no further action”.

Any further incidents of this nature will almost certainly bring Verstappen further into play. The bigger picture, in fact, is that Norris’s 33-point margin over Verstappen is McLaren’s most significant weak point: Verstappen is just one or two wins away from McLaren having to make some very difficult choices regarding the ‘papaya rules’.

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– The Autosport.com Team