McLaren’s quiet masterstroke at Yas Marina didn’t win the race, but it almost certainly won the war.
Max Verstappen did exactly what he said he would do: lead from pole, control his pace, and win the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. What he couldn’t do was the one thing that might have handed him the Drivers’ Championship — back the field up enough to trip Lando Norris. McLaren made sure of that.
The play was simple and ruthless. Split the compounds. Put Oscar Piastri on the hard tyre, leave Norris on the medium alongside Verstappen, then let the race breathe. When Piastri mugged Norris on lap one, it wasn’t an intra-team skirmish so much as the opening move of a planned squeeze on Red Bull. Keep the pressure on Verstappen with a long first stint in clean air, deny him the luxury of games, and remove any incentive to turn the race into a rolling roadblock.
Andrea Stella didn’t dress it up. Max “was always going to run his race and hope the rest fell his way,” the McLaren team principal said afterwards, noting the Dutchman’s pre-race mantra to win and rely on luck. “With two McLarens on split tyres, any attempt to control the pack was always going to be harder.”
It worked. Verstappen stretched away, yes, but crucially he had to stretch. With Piastri welded to second and able to extend on the hards, Red Bull never had the window to slow things down without risking track position. The scenario everyone expected — Verstappen dictating a slow tempo to drag rivals into Norris’s orbit — never materialised.
The final scoreboard said Verstappen first, Piastri second, Norris third. The bigger headline sat one step to the right of the results column: Norris clinched the title, narrowly, with P3 enough to keep Verstappen at arm’s length and finish two points clear of Piastri in an all-McLaren shootout for the crown. Verstappen needed Norris to slip to fourth or worse; McLaren’s structure meant he never did.
The build-up to that call started as soon as qualifying ended. No one was sure if Sunday would be a one- or two-stop, but the paddock shared one certainty: the hard tyre was going to be a weapon. Put a car on hards behind a rival on mediums, and you force the leader to run hot, stop early, or both.
“We had options and we wanted to keep them alive,” Stella explained. “If somebody’s on a hard chasing a medium, the medium car has to push. At some point, they probably have to pit.” The only eyebrow-raiser from McLaren’s pit wall was just how long — and how fast — Verstappen could go on that first medium stint.
As ever, the decision-making at Woking wasn’t a coin toss from the pit lane wall. It was a committee of race engineers, strategists, drivers and senior brass chipping away at the plan through Saturday night and into Sunday morning. Stella stressed it was “collective,” with Zak Brown offering the final nod to split the starting compounds. Sleep on it, wake up, challenge the assumptions, then commit. The sort of calm, grown-up strategy work you only notice when it’s done well.
There was nothing calm about lap one, but the choreography was deliberate. McLaren had discussed the opening corners thoroughly, knowing Piastri on hards had to be free to go after Verstappen immediately. Norris didn’t roll over — it was a clean overtake from Piastri — but he didn’t waste time making his teammate’s life miserable either. That was the deal. Don’t fight each other into trouble; fight Max by denying him the ability to toy with the pace.
That’s the part often missed in the post-race maths. Verstappen was quicker on the day, and Red Bull ended the season with arguably the strongest outright package again after working through a mid-year wobble. Stella even tipped his cap: “They were the fastest car, no surprise to see them finish strong.” But speed was never the whole story in Abu Dhabi. McLaren boxed Verstappen into a straightforward race, and in a title decider full of potential traps, straightforward was the last thing Red Bull needed.
For Norris, the prize is the big one — a first world title sealed with a measured, pressure-proof drive that looked more like a late-2010s championship run than a last-gasp thriller. For Piastri, there’s frustration at being two points shy and delight at being central to the plan that made the difference. For McLaren, it’s vindication. They didn’t always have the fastest car in 2025, but they did have the courage to split, the discipline to stick, and the drivers to make it look almost easy.
In a year where so many races turned on tyre life and timing, McLaren’s final act was to control what they could control and take chaos off the table. Verstappen won the grand prix. McLaren won the season. And at Yas Marina, that was the only game that mattered.
