Autobayng News Team
Max Verstappen’s virtuoso drive to a podium finish from the pit lane deserved a championship-reviving result.
But Lando Norris’s victory meant that, for the first time since the Dutch Grand Prix in August, Verstappen lost ground in the championship chase. His hopes of winning a fifth consecutive crown are not over, but the Brazilian Grand Prix result was a clear blow.
After Austin, where Verstappen scored his fourth win in five races (including sprint events), he admitted his chances of retaining his crown were real. But on Sunday evening he was again ruefully counting the points he lost earlier in the season.
He is still in with a chance, however. In a season which has already drawn parallels with the 2007 championship fight, Verstappen’s fading title hopes offer another point of comparison.
As Verstappen has chipped away at the McLaren drivers’ lead since mid-season, it was hard not to be reminded of the stunning end to the 2007 championship. McLaren appeared to have that drivers’ title fight to themselves, only for Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen to snatch it away at the final race.
Not for nothing have McLaren fielded questions for months about how they intend to avoid a repeat of that season and whether they can afford to keep treating both drivers equally.
But Verstappen’s title hopes aren’t yet as remote as Raikkonen’s were. If Verstappen is to truly play the role of Raikkonen in a re-run of the 2007 contest, he must make little progress over the Las Vegas Grand Prix and Qatar sprint race.
As it stands he is 49 points off the lead with 83 available. Overturning that is clearly a tall order, yet it pales compared to the huge deficit Raikkonen recovered from in 2007.
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As F1 has changed its points system and introduced sprint races since then, comparing the two situations is tricky. But it’s fair to say that if Verstappen is still 49 points behind Norris after the Qatar sprint race he would only be slightly worse off than Raikkonen was with two grands prix left in 2007.
Raikkonen’s 2007 title win
Lap three of the Japanese Grand Prix looked like the ‘all is lost’ moment in Raikkonen’s title bid. While championship leader Lewis Hamilton led the field around the drenched circuit behind the Safety Car, followed by McLaren team mate Fernando Alonso, both Ferrari drivers were ordered into the pits.
The team had neglected to follow the race director’s instructions that all cars were required to start on full wet weather tyres. The Ferrari pair duly came in to exchange their intermediate tyres and fell to the back of the Safety Car queue, Raikkonen in 21st place.
In a result which mirrored Sunday’s outcome at Interlagos, Raikkonen recovered from the back of the field to finish third while the championship leader extended his lead with a victory. At a time when a win was worth 10 points, Raikkonen went into the final two rounds 17 points behind Hamilton.
Raikkonen pulled off his incredible long shot by winning the next two races. Hamilton failed to score in China courtesy of a disastrous strategy and a trip into a pit lane gravel trap, then suffered an apparent gearbox fault in Brazil which left him seventh at the flag, for two points.
To pull off his unlikely title win Raikkonen had to pass not only Hamilton, but Alonso, who was 12 points off the championship lead with two rounds to go. Second and third place finishes for him over the final two rounds meant he, like Hamilton, ended the year a single point behind Raikkonen.
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Verstappen’s 2025 chances
Verstappen’s title hopes aren’t quite as remote as Raikkonen’s were, but he’s getting there. What would it take for Verstappen to go into the final two races as far behind Norris as Raikkonen was behind Hamilton?
The difference between Raikkonen’s two wins and Hamilton’s seventh place was 18 points in 2007. It would be 44 under the current scoring system. So, to have a chance to win the championship with the same two-race turnaround Raikkonen performed 18 years ago, Verstappen would have to gain just six points on Norris over the Las Vegas Grand Prix and Qatar sprint race.
Given his recent rate of progress, Verstappen could easily make that gain. As noted above, last weekend was the first time he’s lost ground to the championship leader since Zandvoort:
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But while the arithmetic of the championship situation looks increasingly similar, the circumstances are not.
Norris and Oscar Piastri are in competition for the championship but McLaren have made it clear they expect them to continue to work together and not disadvantage each other. When the team felt Norris compromised his team mate in Singapore they enforced “repercussions”; these were withdrawn after McLaren felt Piastri took a similarly excessive risk with the team’s other car in the Austin sprint race.
Their relationship could hardly be more different to the fierce rivalry between Alonso and Hamilton in 2007. The pair compromised each other in qualifying at the Hungaroring that year, part of a breakdown in their relationship which led Alonso, who had joined the team that year on a long-term deal, to leave after just one season.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella, who was at Ferrari in 2007, said the situation at McLaren played into their rivals’ hands, and he is anxious to avoid a repeat.
“When we look back at 2007, obviously, we know that there [was] quite a lot of internal competition at McLaren,” he said. “I was on the other side. Potentially, that competition went a little too far, and we could say that racing led [to] the victory [for] the third one, of another team.
“This is a conversation we are having internally right now. We are having conversations with Lando, with Oscar: let’s make sure that the winner drives a papaya car, okay? There’s a bigger interest for the team – and even for yourself – because we look at the future as well, not only the present. Let’s make sure that we collaborate as much as is sensible to do so between two drivers to make sure that the title is papaya overall, and a papaya car.”
After Interlagos, Stella knows the chances of a McLaren driver taking the title this year have improved. Norris now only needs to finish fourth in all the remaining races to be sure of beating Verstappen.
Still, people said similar things about Hamilton in the latter stages of 2007. And no driver would be better cast to play Raikkonen in a recreation of that season than the one who raced from the pits to the podium last weekend.
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2025 Brazilian Grand Prix
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