Verstappen’s manager: Norris “should’ve wrapped it up much earlier” — and Max’s 2025 was “a work of art”
Raymond Vermeulen isn’t in the mood to sugarcoat it. Max Verstappen’s long-time manager has hailed his driver’s 2025 Formula 1 season as “a work of art,” and in the same breath suggested Lando Norris should never have let the title fight go to Abu Dhabi.
In a candid debrief with Formule 1 Magazine, Vermeulen praised Verstappen’s late-season surge — six wins after the summer break and a relentless run of podiums — while pointing straight at McLaren’s execution as the reason the Drivers’ Championship stayed alive so long. “At the beginning, we had a few very bad weekends with the Red Bull Racing team, and those broke us at the end,” he said. “But if you turn it around, McLaren made a lot more mistakes. With that car, Norris should have become champion much earlier, of course.”
McLaren, it’s worth noting, stuck to a firm equal-status policy between Norris and Oscar Piastri even as Verstappen reeled them in. On paper, it looked risky. In practice, it delivered the Constructors’ Championship and, eventually, Norris’s first title. But Vermeulen’s point lands where it always does in title seasons: the fastest car should close the deal without drama. McLaren had the pace for long stretches of 2025; Verstappen’s relentlessness made sure that wasn’t enough.
This was an odd campaign for Red Bull. The early stumbles left Verstappen and the team chasing, then Max turned the whole thing on its head after the break. Vermeulen even floated the question that many in the paddock quietly asked as the run gathered steam: was this, in its own way, an even better Verstappen season than the demolition job of 2023? “We’ve noticed that Max is now getting the international recognition he deserves,” he said. “His performances this season have really captured the imagination… Was this season better than 2023, when he won 19 of 22 races? He has had to come a long way this year.”
The needle between camps moved too. As the three-way fight with Norris and Piastri tightened, Verstappen suggested McLaren’s advantage should’ve made it a non-contest. “If we would have been in the position of how dominant of a car [McLaren] had… [the] championship would have been over a long time ago,” he told Formula1.com around Qatar, adding that “other people’s failures” kept him in it. Norris fired back, deadpan: “Max generally has a good clue about a lot of things. But there’s also a lot of things he doesn’t have much of a clue about… This is also Red Bull’s way of going about things — this kind of aggressive nature and, yeah, just talking nonsense a lot of the time.”
Strip away the sniping and the numbers tell the story. Verstappen’s late charge very nearly produced five consecutive Drivers’ titles. Norris, under pressure for the first time as the man with the most to lose, navigated the final flyaways with just enough composure to bring it home — the Abu Dhabi podium that sealed it by two points as nervy as it gets. Piastri played the wingman without ever being one in name, which is exactly how McLaren wanted it.
Vermeulen’s critique of McLaren’s “mistakes” will sting because it isn’t baseless. Pit calls, track limits lapses, and the odd scruffy Sunday gave Verstappen oxygen. But the counterpoint is the vision McLaren stuck to: manage a title duel in-house without tilting the table, keep the car development aggressive, and trust Norris to learn the art of championship-winning on the fly. He did. It just took him the full season to do it.
For Red Bull, the mood is less regret than recalibration. They took genuine pain early, fixed their weak spots, and ended up looking like themselves again when it mattered most. That it came up short this time doesn’t change the impression Verstappen left: he remains the sport’s metronome, and he was tireless in dragging this contest into November.
In the end, the margins did what margins do. Norris has the number one target on his back now, McLaren has the hardware it came for, and Verstappen has something else: plaudits for a season that forced new fans to take notice, and his manager publicly arguing it might have been better than the year he broke the sport.
Different seasons teach different lessons. 2025 taught Norris how to close, taught McLaren how to manage success, and reminded everyone that if you leave the door ajar, Verstappen will walk right in and make himself at home.
