Max Verstappen, Red Bull, Interlagos, 2025

Max Verstappen says his championship chances have become remote after falling 49 points off the lead in the Brazilian Grand Prix.

The Red Bull driver recovered from a pit lane start to finish third but lost another 10 points to leader Lando Norris.

With a maximum of 83 points available over the remaining three grand prix weekends, Verstappen said “it’s too many points to really have a proper chance.”

This weekend was the first time since the Dutch Grand Prix in August that Verstappen hasn’t gained on the championship lead. But he said the ground lost early in the season has proved too much to overcome.

“If you look at the whole season, we gave away too many points from the beginning ’til the middle of the season,” he told the official Formula 1 channel.

“I think for us, now is [about] trying to just have these highlights, have good race weekends and see what we can do. There are a lot of things that I guess we also still want to analyse from the whole weekend but at least the race was very promising.”

Verstappen was stunned to drop out of qualifying in the first round on Saturday. However his car came to life in the grand prix after Red Bull made changes to his suspension set-up and fitted a new power unit.

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“I had a good first lap after the Safety Car, already overtook some guys,” he said. “But then somehow we picked up that puncture maybe from some debris that flew off in front of me in the first lap.

“Then I think we had strong pace and we did the right calls as well with the strategy. To be on the podium from the pit lane is something that I definitely didn’t expect jumping into the car this morning.”

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