Nov.9 (GMM) Max Verstappen and Oscar Piastri’s championship hopes are hanging by a thread after a disastrous weekend so far in Brazil – as Lando Norris looks like the sudden favourite for the 2025 drivers’ title.
Following Saturday’s main qualifying session at Interlagos, Verstappen will start a maximum of just P16 on Sunday’s grid, while McLaren’s Norris leads the standings by nine points over teammate Piastri – and now 39 clear of Verstappen.
“If I knew, we’d fix it,” Verstappen told Viaplay’s Chiel van Koldenhoven when asked what had gone even more wrong after a sluggish start to the weekend.
“I could talk about it for another ten minutes, but it just isn’t working.”
Red Bull made major setup changes after struggling in the sprint, but the situation only worsened – dramatically. The team is now weighing up whether to start Verstappen from the pitlane to allow even more radical changes – including a new power unit.
“Not necessarily,” Verstappen said when asked if he wanted that option, before abruptly ending his media duties. “Nice and short,” he muttered as he walked away.
Later, the quadruple world champion admitted the title is already effectively lost.
“We don’t need to talk about the championship anymore – that’s clear,” he said. “Everything went our way for a while, and at McLaren things went a bit wrong here and there. That might have given people false hope. But it needed to be perfect after Mexico and this is far from perfect.
“It’s over,” the Dutchman declared, insisting his tendency these days is to keep his emotions “very neutral”.
Red Bull advisor Dr Helmut Marko confirmed the team’s setup changes had backfired badly. “Before, we were only slow intermittently – now it’s constant,” he said at Interlagos.
“Before, we only lost time in sector 2. Now it’s everywhere. It was like we were cursed. The drivers felt zero grip. These tyres are a mystery.”
Marko conceded the team is now “searching for answers”.
“We brought new parts to Mexico that didn’t yield the hoped-for success. We thought we’d found the right direction, but it hasn’t been the case. We have to look at where we took the wrong turn.”
He added that Red Bull had even hoped Piastri might at least slow Norris’s new momentum. “We’d prefer if Oscar could take a few points off Lando. Otherwise, the gap will become too large.
“But unfortunately, Piastri himself is in a slump.”
Indeed, the Australian’s latest in a sequence of underwhelming weekends collapsed when he crashed out of the sprint – losing control on the wet kerb out of the Senna-S moments before Nico Hulkenberg and Franco Colapinto suffered the same fate.
Noting that it was Norris who flicked up the wet puddle that caused the ensuing chaos, George Russell joked afterwards: “A little bit like Mario Kart when you throw the banana out. Smartest guy on the grid, this guy!”
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