Headline: Norris unmoved as Verstappen closes in: “He’s been the threat all year”
Lando Norris walks into Yas Marina with a 12-point cushion and a clear conscience. Max Verstappen is close enough to make it interesting, Oscar Piastri is still in the fight, and McLaren’s title leader insists nothing changes for the finale.
“We’ve treated Max like the threat since day one,” Norris said in Qatar, keeping his voice flat and his eyes on the bigger picture. “Every race, every briefing — we know what he and Red Bull can do. So there’s no reason to act differently now.”
It’s not posturing. Even when Verstappen looked miles back — 104 points off then-leader Piastri after the Dutch Grand Prix — McLaren never bought into the gap. They know how a championship unravels, and how quickly Verstappen tidies it back up. Over the final third of the season, the reigning champion has dragged himself into range and arrives in Abu Dhabi with a shot at a fifth consecutive title.
Norris can kill the suspense with a podium on Sunday. That’s the cleanest line through this. Verstappen’s win last time out tightened the screws, but it didn’t flip the narrative: the title is still Norris’s to lose. Verstappen, four points ahead of Piastri, must do what he usually does at Yas Marina — qualify up front, control the tempo, and pray McLaren blinks.
McLaren, for their part, say blinking isn’t on the agenda.
“Engineers, mechanics, me — we’ve kept it all very normal,” Norris added. “We’re happy with the job we’ve done, we know the bits we need to sharpen for this weekend and for next year, and we’re not overcomplicating it. No drama.”
That’s been the tone from Woking for months: methodical, almost stubbornly calm. There’s been no victory parade planning, no wild setups chasing headlines — just a car that’s generally quick everywhere and a driver who’s learned to bank big points on scrappy days. It’s the sort of grown-up title push we haven’t seen from McLaren in a long time, and it’s put Norris exactly where he wanted to be when the lights go out on the season.
Verstappen’s threat is obvious, because Verstappen’s threat is always obvious. He’s turned consistency into a weapon again, and if he smells an opening in Turn 1 on Sunday, he’ll take it. But this is a three-hander, and Piastri has spent most of the campaign making a nuisance of himself in the best possible way. If he’s the one who nails qualifying, the pressure dynamic changes in a heartbeat.
Yas Marina rewards the tidy. Mistakes here can cost you three corners later, and track position usually means everything. Expect the qualifying lap to be chewed over for hours, the out-lap games to start early, and the radio traffic to sound more like chess than chaos. A Safety Car can throw the table over — this place has history on that front — but strategy tends to do the heavy lifting.
So it’s simple, and it’s not. Norris doesn’t need to beat Verstappen, he just needs to stay in his airspace. Verstappen needs to be Verstappen plus a little luck. And Piastri? He needs to be perfect, and hope both of them aren’t.
No one inside McLaren is pretending otherwise, which is precisely the point. Treat the danger like it’s been there all year — because it has — and let the math do the rest.
