Stella shouts it, Marko shrugs: Verstappen’s title chase is officially back on — if Singapore plays ball
Two weeks ago in Monza it felt like a warning shot. In Baku, Max Verstappen turned it into a statement. Back-to-back poles and lights-to-flag wins have snapped Red Bull’s season awake, and McLaren boss Andrea Stella isn’t whispering about it — he’s writing it in capitals.
“Verstappen is in the fight,” was the message from the McLaren pit wall after Azerbaijan, where Lando Norris could salvage only seventh and Oscar Piastri ended his day in the TechPro. The damage? Verstappen cut the gap to championship leader Piastri to 69 points, and crucially, the RB21 finally looks like it’s carrying speed everywhere again, not just in a straight line.
Red Bull’s big upgrade package, first rolled out at Spa and refined through Zandvoort, seems to have clicked. Monza looked like a classic low-drag sweet spot; Baku confirmed it’s more than that. The car sat nicely in medium and low-speed, and Verstappen had the confidence to lean on it. McLaren, by contrast, had what they suspected they might: a scruffy weekend on a layout that never quite came to them.
Stella sounded more relieved than rattled, but the subtext was clear: if Red Bull have actually unlocked the window they’ve been hunting, this title fight isn’t a two-car McLaren exhibition anymore. “We’re talking about Max Verstappen and Red Bull,” he said, essentially. “If the car’s competitive, he’ll deliver.”
Helmut Marko heard the capital letters and offered a veteran’s eyebrow raise. Optimistic? Sure. Premature? Maybe. “I hope he’s right,” the Red Bull advisor smiled, before adding the cold water: the gap remains chunky, and McLaren rarely leave free points on the table.
So they’ve both circled the same red date. Singapore.
Marina Bay has been a reliable barometer for pretenders and contenders, and lately, it hasn’t been Red Bull’s happiest hunting ground. Even during their 2023 steamroller of a season, this was the one that got away. Tropical heat, a bumpy street surface, huge energy sensitivity — if there’s any residue of weakness in the RB21, this is where it shows up. Marko didn’t dress it up: Singapore will be the benchmark. If they’re genuinely at McLaren’s pace there, then they can “start dreaming.”
There’s a psychological layer to this too. McLaren have owned 2025’s centre stage with the Piastri–Norris duel, the kind of in-house, clean-hard fight that teams say they want until it starts costing them sleep. Verstappen muscling back into the picture changes the emotional calculus. Suddenly it isn’t just orange-on-orange; now it’s the sport’s most ruthless closer sniffing an opening, and he’s not in the mood to hand out second chances.
The arithmetic is still ugly for Red Bull. Sixty-nine points is a canyon if McLaren tidy it up in Singapore and the races after. But they know how this works. You chip away, you keep the pressure on, you make the leaders look at the mirrors a little more than the apex. Win Singapore — or even split the McLarens on outright pace — and it won’t just be Stella typing in capitals.
What’s different now versus the early summer lull is how Verstappen is winning again. The Monza and Baku victories were authoritative, free of knife-edge strategy calls or late safety car luck. They looked like Red Bull wins, the kind we got used to in the recent past. That matters. It feeds belief inside a team that has been chasing itself a bit this season, looking for balance and bite in a field that caught up.
There’s a risk in over-reading one bad McLaren weekend and two very clean Red Bull ones. Call it caution, or just scar tissue from every title fight that’s turned on a single ill-timed DNF. But there’s also a feeling in the paddock that the momentum needle flickered for the first time in months. McLaren aren’t rattled; they’ve been too good, too disciplined for that. Yet the orange garage knows what’s coming in the mirrors, and the blue one knows Singapore is where the bluff gets called.
Verstappen’s back. The only debate now is whether he’s back in time. Marina Bay will tell us if Stella’s capitals stick — or if Marko’s caution was the wiser read.
