Has Verstappen’s Spanish GP tantrum cost him F1 title shot?
Max Verstappen’s already-slim championship hopes took a significant hit at Sunday’s Spanish Grand Prix when frustration got the better of him and he drove his Red Bull into the side of George Russell‘s Mercedes. That led to a 10-second time penalty, which translated into a 10th-place finish and a single championship point from a race weekend in which a podium finish and 15 points were so nearly within his grasp.
The result means the defending champion is now 49 points adrift of championship leader Oscar Piastri in the drivers’ standings and 39 points off Lando Norris in second place. As Verstappen was grilled by media after the race about his questionable race craft, he was keen to deflect the criticism and talk about anything else — including his dwindling title chances.
“If there are any [hopes], we are way too slow any way to fight for the title,” he said. “I think that was clear again today.”
Prior to the Spanish Grand Prix, a degree of speculative hope had been emanating from Red Bull that more stringent front-wing deflection tests might peg back McLaren’s progress. If anything, though, Formula 1‘s championship leader seemed least impacted by the technical directive, reporting a performance difference that was “within the noise” of typical circuit-to-circuit variation once modifications had been made to its wing to comply.
Piastri and Norris duly emerged as the dominant force in qualifying at the Circuit de Barcelona Catalunya and went on to take a comfortable 1-2 victory in Sunday’s race. On the face of it, the championship battle has never looked more like a two-horse race than it does now.
But despite the flood of negative headlines on Sunday, his repentant Instagram post on Monday and a recalcitrant Red Bull all year, it would be an exceedingly brave call to rule Verstappen out of the title race just yet.
Why Verstappen can’t be counted out
Cycle back to the first race of F1’s European triple-header and the picture looked very different. In Imola, Verstappen took the lead of the race from Piastri at the first corner and went on to take a convincing victory ahead of both McLarens.
Updates in Miami and Imola helped Verstappen find a happier balance in his car, which in turn allowed him to manage his tires more effectively and outpace the McLarens. What followed in Monaco and Spain was far less convincing, but came on two circuits that exposed some of the remaining weaknesses of the Red Bull — and in the case of Spain, explicitly played to the strengths of McLaren.
“In a way, I’m a little surprised that we had such a clear advantage [in Spain],” McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said after his team’s most dominant qualifying showing of the season on Saturday. “Especially I would have expected Red Bull to be a little closer based on some of the similar circuit characteristics that we found in Suzuka or in Imola. But I think in hindsight, looking at the temperatures, which were very high, the kind of limitations, which at least for us, they were mainly associated with the rear axle, and I think it’s where our car performs very well.”
Managing overheating rear tires has been one of McLaren’s core strengths this season. Prior to Sunday’s Spanish Grand Prix, the positive trait was also evident in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Miami — to the point that rivals started to suspect the orange cars were employing tricks beyond what is permitted in the regulations.
It was perhaps no surprise, then, that on a scorching hot and abrasive track surface in Barcelona, McLaren once again emerged with an advantage over Verstappen. On top of that, the heat was combined with another key difference between Spain and Imola that helped swing the pendulum further in McLaren’s favor.
“If we want to be slightly more technical, one characteristic of Spain is that the corners are very long — unlike Imola, where the corners are relatively shorter,” Stella said. “And I think in these long corners, the MCL39 seems to be able to carry over some of the qualities of the predecessor, whereby last year, for instance, in Zandvoort, another track with long corners, Lando dominated the weekend.
“So I think we retained some of the strengths from an aerodynamic point of view, despite having improved the car. And I think overall, they were rewarding in this kind of track, that even if the speed range is similar to some others, the length of the corner helped us today.”
Given the McLaren’s inherent strengths at Barcelona, it was perhaps a surprise how close Verstappen was able to remain during the race. On paper, the three-stop strategy adopted by Red Bull should have been slower than the more conventional two-stop of the McLaren drivers, yet midway through the race, Verstappen remained too close for any kind of comfort on the McLaren pit wall.
“He was fast and when we went on the medium tires in the second stint, we were pushing, controlling the pace and he was catching up very rapidly, more rapidly than we hoped for,” Stella said. “So at some stage we even asked our drivers if we should push more and both gave answers like, ‘I’m not sure I have much more pace than this.’
“So at that stage we were a little worried that it could have been a situation more open than we thought it would be in the first stint, but thankfully Verstappen started to tail off a bit, Oscar found quite a lot of pace at the end of the second stint and this allowed us to go through the pit stop sequence in a controlled way.”
The safety car that followed the final round of planned pit stops exposed the inherent risk of Red Bull’s three-stop strategy, though, as Verstappen only had a set of hard tires left to switch to when he was called into the pits. There was one remaining set of soft tires in his allocation, but they had completed three laps in qualifying and four laps to the grid ahead of the race, meaning they offered very little advantage over the eight-lap-old softs already fitted to Verstappen’s car.
“The safety car came out on [lap] 54, which was probably the worst possible time in terms of our strategy,” Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said on Sunday. “Because you’re faced with then the choice of: do you stay out on an eight-lap-old, heavily pushed soft tire, at which point you would get eaten up at the restart?
“It looked like there would be circa ten racing laps left. Unfortunately, the only set of tires that we had available, having gone on to that three-stop strategy, was a new set of hards. And so our feeling was that a new set of hards was better than an eight-lap-old, heavily degraded set of softs. So that’s what we did. We took the stop.”
What followed was the now-well-documented Verstappen meltdown in the final six laps of the race. Up to that point, though, the defending champion had arguably been more competitive vs. the McLarens than he had any right to be given the circuit characteristics and high temperatures.
play0:31Piastri and Norris reflect on McLaren’s one-two finish at Spain GP
Teammates Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris reflect on a “good weekend” for McLaren at the Spanish Grand Prix.
While Verstappen is right in saying the Barcelona performance gap to McLaren would make a title bid prohibitive if it was stretched across the rest of the season, fortunately for the four-time champion (not to mention the millions of fans watching around the world), the remaining 15 races will be held at a variety of circuit types. Upcoming grands prix in Canada, Austria and Great Britain should be more suited to the Red Bull and could all take place in cooler conditions, making them a crucial juncture in Verstappen’s championship campaign.
What’s more, if the battle between the McLaren drivers remains competitive, it has the potential to push more opportunities Verstappen’s way as Norris and Piastri will ultimately take points off one another.
Had Verstappen finished third in Spain, he would have only dropped three points to Piastri over the three races of the triple-header despite the clear car advantage McLaren had at two of those three races. Of course, losing three points every three races is not enough for Verstappen to win the championship, but with the competitive order likely to swing from track to track, it’s proof he could retain a fighting chance by scoring consistent results.
Which is what makes his self-inflicted points loss in Spain all the more galling. Added to the championship points that went missing on Sunday, Verstappen will also walk a tightrope for the next two races as he is one penalty point away from a race ban. Two of the 11 penalty points currently on his superlicence will be wiped away when they expire at the end of June (one year on from his clash with Norris at the Red Bull Ring last season), but in Canada and Austria, he will be one minor transgression away from a race on the sidelines and his last remaining hopes of a title challenge evaporating.
Assuming he behaves himself, however, Verstappen needs to outscore Piastri by an average of 3.27 points per race over the remaining 15 rounds and Norris by 2.6 points to be crowned champion. Viewed like that, it’s not an insurmountable challenge, but one that will require near-perfect performances for the rest of the season.
“Look, I think there’s a significant gap now but there’s an awful lot of points still available,” Horner said on Sunday evening when asked if the drivers’ title was already beyond Verstappen’s grasp. “We’re not even at halfway point in the year, so McLaren are in a very strong position, but we never give up.”
Source: espn.com