Verstappen’s Baku win lights a fire under the title fight — but Red Bull aren’t buying the hype just yet
Two Sundays, two wins, and suddenly the maths looks a lot kinder. Max Verstappen’s victories at Monza and Baku have turned a 104-point hole into a 69-point deficit to Oscar Piastri, with seven rounds left in 2025. After an eight‑race winless run that mirrored last year but with none of 2024’s early-season cushion, Verstappen has dragged himself back into the conversation.
This is not how the middle of the year felt. McLaren ran hot and ran hard — 13 grands prix wins, seven of them 1-2s — while Verstappen wrestled an unbalanced RB21 that had drifted away from its sweet spot. The reigning champion often couldn’t even sniff the podium. Then Red Bull rolled in upgrades at Monza, found grip and confidence, and the world shifted half a step. Baku did the rest: Lando Norris only seventh, Piastri out on lap one, and Verstappen — ruthless as ever — did the rest.
Even McLaren can see the momentum swing, faint as it still is. “People have caught up,” Norris said. “Red Bull brought upgrades last weekend, they’re clearly doing well, and their race pace is strong… We knew they could be a threat.” Team boss Andrea Stella was plainer: Verstappen is a “very serious contender.”
Inside Red Bull, though, the temperature is deliberately cooler. Laurent Mekies is smiling again, yes, but he’s not feeding the title narrative.
“We really take it race by race,” the Red Bull team principal said after Baku. “We don’t look at the championship positions. We don’t even look at it from a constructor’s perspective. It’s nice to look at the battle for second place, but we take it step by step in terms of our understanding of the car and lap time.
“We got some good answers in Monza. We got some good answers today. We’re equally conscious they are two very, very specific tracks. Singapore is going to be a different challenge. How we tackle it? What we learned, how much of that applies, how much risk you want to take? At the moment, we try to have a high-risk approach to learn as much as we can at the end of the season. That prevails over championship discussions.”
That “high-risk approach” is the tell. This is Red Bull pivoting from survival mode back into development aggression — willing to trade setup certainty for speed if the data says it’s there. The question now is whether their Monza/Baku step is circuit-specific, or real enough to travel.
Verstappen isn’t pretending otherwise. “I don’t rely on hope,” he said. “It’s seven rounds left. Sixty-nine points is a lot. I just go race by race, what I’ve been doing basically the whole season — try to do the best we can, score the most points we can. After Abu Dhabi, we’ll know.”
Next stop: Singapore. It’s a venue that’s never quite bent to Verstappen’s will. No wins. No poles. The car will run high downforce, the tyres will cook, and it’s a night race that exposes any weakness in traction and balance. He knows the score. “I’ve never won there,” he shrugged. “We’ll see. It’s completely different… A lot of deg on the tyres. I really don’t know at the moment.”
Strip away the noise and you’re left with this: McLaren still hold the cards. Piastri’s lead is significant, Norris is quick everywhere, and their car has been relentlessly complete. But Verstappen is Verstappen. If Red Bull’s Monza upgrade is as robust as it looked in Italy and Azerbaijan, the gap can close fast, especially if McLaren’s execution wobbles under pressure. If it isn’t, then these past two weeks will stand as a pair of bright postcards from a title chase that never quite materialised.
The champion’s path to a fifth straight crown remains narrow. The threat he poses is not. And as the paddock packs for Marina Bay, here’s the uncomfortable truth for Woking: when Verstappen smells momentum, he usually finds a way to keep it.
