Verstappen’s 64-point swing leaves Red Bull smelling blood — “We’re watching history,” says Mekies
Something shifted after Zandvoort. Max Verstappen, 104 points down on Oscar Piastri at the Dutch Grand Prix, has hacked that deficit to 40 in four race weekends and hauled Red Bull back into a title fight that looked finished at half-time.
Monza, Baku, a hard-edged second in Singapore, and then a double on COTA’s punishing asphalt — Sprint and Grand Prix — have turned the season’s arc. He’s banked 119 of the last 133 available points. Momentum has a smell, and right now it smells like Red Bull rubber.
Laurent Mekies, the man running Red Bull’s pit wall, didn’t bother hiding how he felt in Austin. “I think watching Max driving is watching history in the making,” he said after Verstappen sliced 23 points out of Piastri’s lead across two days in Texas. “He surprises us every time he goes out on track… how much sensitivity he has in stuff that we sometimes can see and sometimes we cannot see.”
COTA was supposed to be the booby trap. The bumps, the heat, the wide mix of corner speeds and the sort of tyre deg that’s been McLaren’s comfort zone all year — they’ve punished Red Bull before. Not this time. “It’s probably our strongest weekend in a long while, on a burning hot track where, in the past, it has been tricky for us,” Mekies said. “Max kept increasing the gap to competitors through every session… from a tight Friday to near-domination today.”
There’s a reason Verstappen sounded emboldened on Sunday night. Piastri hasn’t stood on the top step since Zandvoort, and the RB21’s updates have finally stuck across different layouts. The numbers say the gap’s still large. The body language says otherwise.
Mekies has been careful not to paint this as a one-man rescue act, even if Verstappen’s fingerprints are all over the turnaround. “We don’t separate Max and the car and the team, it’s one group,” he stressed. “Max is not sitting outside of the project, watching the project. He is at the heart of the project.”
That’s been obvious in the way Red Bull have worked the last few events: aggressive set-up calls, a willingness to be uncomfortable on Fridays to cash in on Sundays, and an RB21 that looks less peaky and more pliable. “We have canceled out a large part of the deficit we had in the first part of the season, and now it’s down to the last details,” Mekies said. “Even on a weekend like this, there will be things we can learn… getting the car in the best possible shape for Mexico.”
The uplift hasn’t only been on the No. 1 car’s side of the garage. Yuki Tsunoda has ridden the wave too, following a Baku sixth with seventh in Austin — the sort of support points that matter when the championship tightens and strategy windows get messy.
If 2024 was Verstappen the front-runner fending off a faster McLaren package over the long game, 2025 has flipped the roles. He’s the hunter now, bringing a car that’s no longer obviously the quickest but is clearly alive in his hands. The outright pace picture? Still fluid. Mekies believes the advantage McLaren enjoyed earlier in the year has been erased. “Back in Spa we won the Sprint but were still a fair half a second slower than them, every lap,” he said. “Even in Zandvoort… probably half a second slower than them every lap. I think that has now gone.”
What remains is a knife fight between three or four teams depending on the circuit — execution, weather, tyres and track nuance deciding who wins on a given Sunday. “I don’t think anyone is in a dominant position,” Mekies added. “Every race of the remaining races will be about which of these four teams is nailing the track layout, the conditions, the temperatures, the tyres — and then that guy will win.”
Strip the engineer-speak and the picture’s simple enough. Red Bull’s risk-taking in the factory and on the road has unlocked performance when they needed it most. Verstappen has done the rest, driving at what Mekies called “an incredible level.”
This isn’t over. The math is still tough, the margin for error microscopic, and Piastri has looked unflappable all season. But the tone around the paddock has changed. A 104-point chasm has turned into a fight you can feel in the garages and hear on the radios.
History in the making? Maybe. At the very least, it’s a title race again. Mexico will tell us if the chase is real enough to run all the way to the flag.
