“Yeah, I think so,” Max Verstappen concurred, when it was put to him that 2025 had demonstrated his best season-wide performance across his Formula 1 career so far. “I have no regrets about my season. I think the performance has been strong. I’ve hated this car at times, but I’ve also loved it at times. And I always tried to extract the most from it, even in the difficult weekends that we’ve had. But, yeah, it’s been a proper roller coaster with the car. Luckily, the last eight or nine rounds in general have been a lot more enjoyable.”
And that encapsulates the feast-and-famine nature of his title defence, one that ended with him conceding defeat as Lando Norris claimed his first championship crown. Even without a fifth title, Verstappen can draw significant satisfaction from his year, specifically with how it ended; he was, without a single iota of doubt, the class act of the field.
Verstappen felt that his title chances were down-and-out after his home race at Zandvoort. While the Dutchman had finished second to Oscar Piastri, albeit after Norris’s oil system developed a terminal leak, he was staring down the barrel of a three-figure deficit to Piastri in the title race. Red Bull’s early-season struggles had cost him significant ground, to the point where he was certain that he was out of the reckoning.
Red Bull’s difficulties began part-way through 2024, when a series of development avenues finished in dead ends. After an excellent start to the year, where Verstappen registered seven wins in the opening 10 races, his fourth title had looked inevitable. Yet Red Bull’s attempts to keep the development rolling on last year’s RB20 narrowed its peak window of performance, making it obscenely difficult to dial into a set-up that could make the most of the car. By comparison, McLaren was finding much stronger form, and it was only Verstappen’s brilliance at Interlagos that ensured Norris’s late title bid was covered off.
The difficulties continued into 2025, when Red Bull perhaps hadn’t realised where it was going wrong. Verstappen’s results weren’t bad, per se, but far short of his stratospheric expectations. The new RB21 remained a far trickier customer to work with than the McLaren; it had potential, but it continued to be incredibly awkward to realise it.
Still, Verstappen’s shock-and-awe pole lap at Suzuka – and subsequent conversion into victory – exemplified his consummate skill on a real drivers’ circuit, and further pole positions in Saudi Arabia and Miami were very much continuations of that. It helped slightly that McLaren had a car stronger in races than on single-lap pace, but Verstappen was fully deserving of the accolades accrued from landing on a workable set-up and reeling off monstrous laps on command.
Of course, in the first half of 2025, Barcelona was the fly in the ointment. Frustrated by his race, and his perception that he was being passed at will amid the final sprint to the finish after a late safety car, he dumped his Red Bull into the side of George Russell and was hit with a penalty for dangerous driving. He was later remorseful of his actions; rather than let the red mist shroud his thinking, Verstappen knuckled down with his team to find a solution to Red Bull’s hot-and-cold competitiveness.
Red Bull’s shareholders had their own ideas on how to improve the situation, and dispensed with Christian Horner after 20 years in charge. Laurent Mekies was brought in as team principal and, while the Frenchman shirked from the credit, he challenged the team’s way of thinking in his opening weeks. Over-reliance on dated simulation tools and a wind tunnel that had started to lose correlation to the real world was seen as a factor in Red Bull’s fall, and Mekies wanted the technical department to start questioning its decisions more effectively. Driver feedback, particularly from Verstappen, was viewed as a key component here.
Although the new floor for the Italian GP had likely already been defined at this point, Mekies’s reforms ensured that it was ship-shape and ready to go for Monza. Imbued with confidence around the high-speed layout, Verstappen reeled off his third win of the season to lay the foundations for a searing run of form – which defied even his own expectations when it came to the championship.
Capitalising on McLaren’s – particularly Piastri’s – implosion in Baku, Verstappen’s win there was a colossal statement of intent. He beat the McLarens again in Singapore, dwarfed only by Russell, and then captured another victory at Austin. In four races, Verstappen had slashed a 104-point deficit in the championship to just 40.
At this juncture it was Norris, not Piastri, who assumed McLaren’s drivers’ title hopes; the Briton’s back-to-back wins in Mexico and Brazil had been enough to grow his advantage over Verstappen to 49 points. Verstappen finished third on both occasions to lessen the damage, Interlagos in scintillating fashion after battling from the pitlane with a completely revised race set-up following a dismal qualifying.
While Verstappen admitted to luck and “early Christmas presents” keeping him in the frame, he capitalised on both McLaren’s double-disqualification from Las Vegas for plank wear transgressions and its strategy misstep in Qatar. His dominant end-of-season win in Abu Dhabi was a final flourish, and he ended the year just two points behind Norris on the scoreboard – and with more wins than either McLaren driver. Hence, he’s our worthy number one again this year.
Read and post comments