The 2025 Formula 1 season is unfolding with dramatic twists, and the biggest question circulating among fans is: can Max Verstappen actually beat Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris to the 2025 F1 World Championship? At first glance, this seems like a far-fetched notion, especially given McLaren’s absolute dominance for most of the season. However, within McLaren, there is genuine concern, and they believe Verstappen remains a formidable factor in the title fight. This isn’t just because Verstappen has won the last two races convincingly, but because of the sudden and significant improvement in the overall performance of the Red Bull package Verstappen is driving, which has McLaren seriously worried.

The recent races at Monza and Baku are quite unique circuits, requiring a low-downforce setup where Verstappen often excels, and Red Bull has shown impressive speed at other times this season. However, McLaren is more concerned about a fundamental shift they’ve detected in Red Bull’s performance profile since the Italian Grand Prix. Not only has Verstappen been incredibly quick in qualifying and the races, but McLaren has also overheard radio messages suggesting Red Bull has found increased downforce because its car is now running lower to the ground than before. This, as we know, is key to getting better performance from the current ground-effect cars.

McLaren thinks the new floor Red Bull introduced for Monza might have allowed them to finally run the troublesome RB21 at the correct ride height to access its underbody downforce. In the words of McLaren team boss Andreas Stella, Verstappen is “talking about grounding much more than he was doing before.” This refers to the underbody legality plank striking the track when the car compresses under load. Being able to run these ground-effect F1 cars low enough to generate downforce without excessively wearing that plank is key to performance. It’s why Ferrari has generally struggled in 2025, and it might be why Red Bull has been relatively subdued until recently. Stella also mentioned in Baku how quick the Red Bull was through Monza’s medium-speed corners, which suggests Verstappen’s team has made a significant breakthrough in terms of widening the performance profile of the car into an area where McLaren has tended to be stronger.

However, Red Bull team boss Laurent Mekies argues there is no “silver bullet” here to explain Red Bull’s form. He says this recent uptick is the result of his team “leaving no stone unturned” when it comes to trying to understand and extract more from what has until now been a very difficult car to make work. Beyond the Monza floor tweaks, the Red Bull has recently greatly improved in low-downforce trim by also carrying significantly more front wing than its rivals in Baku. As at Monza, a front end in which Verstappen can derive the initial rotation into the corner more by steering and less by the rear end pivoting has increased his confidence significantly. As Verstappen indicates, Monza and Baku are both circuits where you need to attack the corner entries under braking rather than carry mid-corner speed, so this extra confidence in the front end gripping would be a powerful weapon in unlocking more lap time around Baku.

Even before the wind and rain got involved in qualifying, the Red Bull was competitive with the McLaren, just as at Monza. And even with a skinnier rear wing than either McLaren or Ferrari runs, it retains good downforce, implying the Red Bull’s underbody aero is perhaps still the best around. A car deriving a bigger proportion of its total downforce from the underbody than a rival will logically be less upset by changes in wind strength and direction. It maybe doesn’t retain that underbody advantage through higher-speed corners where the McLaren habitually rules, but that doesn’t really matter around Baku. A planted front end, flying down the straights, Verstappen at the wheel, and a team operating tightly around those hard points was enough to produce Verstappen’s sixth pole and fourth victory of the season.

Conversely, Norris spent much of his Baku race, as he put it, “barely keeping up” with the second-slower Red Bull of Yuki Tsunoda, and says people need to stop being surprised Red Bull is so quick, particularly in lower-downforce trim where he thinks Red Bull is on another level compared to McLaren. The big question now is if Red Bull can translate this improvement—better underbody aero, better use of the simulation tools at the factory, more driver-focused in terms of its in-race setup decisions—to more conventional circuits. Mekies cautions that after two specialist tracks, F1 will begin to move back to more mid-speed circuits where McLaren has tended to have a huge advantage. Red Bull is at least content that it has been able to win convincingly at two low-downforce tracks with slightly different corner speed profiles. This is a world away from only a couple of months ago when, as Mekies put it, Red Bull left Spa thinking McLaren was half a second faster. Red Bull is also prepared to take risks on tire choices and strategy, knowing it has potentially everything to gain for Verstappen and relatively little to lose at this point.

Singapore will be an acid test of Red Bull’s newfound form—a track where Norris dominated from pole in 2024 and where Red Bull has tended to struggle even when Verstappen was otherwise dominating. Mekies says this is a track where the slow-speed corners remain, but the downforce level becomes much higher. This is where Red Bull has been struggling quite a lot, as was the case in Hungary and before that race too. It’s also an incredibly hot and long race, usually featuring significant thermal tire degradation, which is where McLaren has derived its fundamental advantage from. If Verstappen dominates there, then McLaren’s alarm bells will surely start to ring much louder.

McLaren could have wrapped up the constructors’ championship already with a better result in Baku, and given McLaren heads to Singapore now with a 333-point lead over Mercedes, a successful defense of that crown still feels like an inevitability at this point. Meanwhile, all anyone has been talking about for most of this season is that the drivers’ championship essentially boils down to a two-horse race between Piastri and Norris, especially after that incredible run of seven wins from eight races spanning Norris’s victory in Monaco to Piastri’s triumph at Zandvoort. They are still in an overwhelmingly favorable position heading into the final seven races of 2025, with Piastri leading Norris by 25 points. Verstappen is 69 points behind Piastri after dominating in Baku. That’s 10 points further behind at this stage of the season than Norris was behind Max in their 2024 “not really a battle” title battle. Verstappen needs to take an average of 10 points per weekend out of Piastri over the remainder of the season to turn the tide, and that includes three sprint races in Austin, Brazil, and Qatar. If Verstappen wins each of the seven remaining races plus those sprints, he would secure a total of 199 extra points. That would mean Verstappen taking the title if Piastri scored 130 points or fewer over those remaining seven events.

Piastri’s awful Azerbaijan Grand Prix, where he crashed out on lap one after jumping the start, means he can’t afford to finish third to Verstappen in every race from now on and still be guaranteed the title. So therein lies an opportunity for Red Bull to be the disruptor. If Piastri is beaten by Norris each time out from now to the end while Verstappen wins every race, this would only be enough to give Piastri 126 points, and so Verstappen would be champion. The other aspect is how quickly McLaren can return to form after what was comfortably its worst weekend of the season.

It’s clear the McLaren looked a trickier car to make work around Baku—potentially the fastest, but not robustly so, more affected by the wind and more reactive in its balance to the switch from one tire compound to another. The car had decent balance on the soft C6 compound on Friday but couldn’t retain that as conditions worsened for qualifying. Added to that was some scruffy driving: both Norris and Piastri struck the wall on Friday and again on Saturday, with Piastri crashing out of Q3 and Norris brushing the turn 15 barrier on his crucial lap at the end. Piastri’s event fell apart with what Stella called “uncharacteristic mistakes” from the championship leader, while Norris was stuck in traffic after starting down in seventh, compounded by his second slow pit stop in as many races. Norris’s description of the lower-downforce trim McLaren as a car that “can still bite you” helps explain why Baku was such a struggle, as well as being potentially more wind-sensitive than the Red Bull. Perhaps the McLaren just lacks that front-end feel Verstappen is utilizing so well with this current version of the Red Bull. A relative numbness through the McLaren’s front axle is something that has been spoken about since the earliest races of the season and indeed has led to McLaren developing a specific version of the front suspension for Norris to give him better feel through the steering.

Stella says McLaren always expected Baku to be difficult, describing this track and Vegas as the two that would most expose the car because it’s less about carrying corner speed, where the McLaren is strong, and much more about straight-line braking, where the McLaren is relatively weak. But we shouldn’t forget that McLaren won this race in 2024 thanks to Piastri’s daring turn-one pass on Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari, plus the aid of a bit of extra flexibility back then permitted in the McLaren’s rear wing. So, it’s hardly been a bogey track in the way Vegas definitely has been historically for the team. McLaren will naturally expect an improvement in form over the upcoming races, but maybe Red Bull’s Monza floor upgrade will lift Verstappen properly into that picture too. If that happens, the added problem for Piastri and Norris is that they are taking points off each other because of how evenly matched they are, which is adding up to an impressive constructors’ championship lead for McLaren but leaving the drivers still vulnerable to the sort of singularly focused challenge from behind that Verstappen at his best represents. Stella says McLaren is aware of this problem internally and is even prepared to eventually back one driver over the other if the Verstappen threat from behind becomes too great. But Stella says this is far away from the team’s thinking for the moment.

Nevertheless, it’s notable that McLaren is suddenly very concerned about the increasing threat Verstappen poses. During his post-qualifying media briefing in Baku, Stella was asked several times to clarify his suggestion that Verstappen remains a genuine title contender and replied, “A firm yes, capital yes.” The subsequent events of the race naturally did nothing to change his mind, even though Stella expects McLaren to be much stronger when bigger wings are fitted for the next event. But if Verstappen and Red Bull can keep this prodigious form up while Piastri and Norris make a few more key mistakes at key moments, then maybe Verstappen can have a say in this 2025 title fight after all.