Max Verstappen reckons his Spanish Grand Prix clash will not be the reason he misses out on the 2025 Formula 1 world championship should a McLaren driver claim it.
The Red Bull racer is level with second-placed Oscar Piastri and 24 points off leader Lando Norris with 58 available across the remaining Qatar and Abu Dhabi weekends.
It’s actually quite remarkable that Verstappen is even in the title conversation given the previous dominance of the McLaren pair and how Red Bull struggled with its car for much of the year.
But upgrades for round 16 at Monza was the turning point for the Austrian outfit and four of seven wins followed, allowing Verstappen to cut his previous 104-point deficit off top.
The four-time world champion has been widely regarded as the best driver in 2025 but there has been one “point of criticism”, as Verstappen described it, which was Barcelona in June.
It saw Verstappen finish 10th after receiving a 10-second penalty for colliding with George Russell late on, having been angered by his team wrongly asking him to hand fourth to the Mercedes driver.
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari, Lando Norris, McLaren, Oscar Piastri, McLaren, Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing
Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images via Getty Images
That’s because Verstappen, who had just lost third to Charles Leclerc at the safety car restart, took the Turn 1 escape road after Russell lunged down the inside and banged wheels with him.
Red Bull assumed that the stewards were set to penalise the Dutchman, but it later emerged that they weren’t going to and, as he disagreed with the order, Verstappen lost his cool.
The whole incident cost him nine-11 points and although he told F1TV “I regret how I handled it at the time”, he thinks it doesn’t define his whole campaign.
“You also have to understand how I got to that point,” added Verstappen, before he qualified sixth for Saturday’s sprint race in Qatar.
“So, we did a lot of things wrong in that decision before I even got to the, how would you even call it, the moment where I got upset or whatever. But it’s also because I care a lot. I could have also easily said, ‘well, whatever, the race is done anyway’, but that’s not how I am.
“But of course, that’s a moment that you look back at and that’s not OK, but it’s also not a moment that at the end of the season, let’s say I miss out on the championship, it’s not a moment that I will say ‘that’s the moment that I lost it’, because we’ve lost it because of our general performance.
“We’ve still been in it also because of our performance, because we did maximise or over-perform in other places, or we just were better in executing.”
Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing
Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images
Verstappen then stated that he feels he’s “pretty much maximised” every other weekend, but also admitted that this is not the sole reason he is still in the title fight.
While the Red Bull driver has enjoyed a late resurgence, costly errors from Norris, Piastri and the wider McLaren team have brought him into the conversation.
Piastri crashed on lap one in Baku, for example, and the McLaren pair both collided in the Austin sprint, while they were also disqualified from the Las Vegas GP for excessive plank wear.
“Listen, if it doesn’t happen, it’s not going to change my life,” said Verstappen. “Five? Great if I win another one, but we also have to be realistic.
“We are in this fight, still, because of other people’s failures, not because of, if you look at the whole of the season, what we did.
“Yes, we did really well. We have really maximised pretty much all races before the ones that I mentioned, but if we would have been in the position of how dominant of a car they had, let’s say like that, the championship would have been over a long time ago.”
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– The Autosport.com Team
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