Johnny Herbert has a warning for anyone painting this title fight orange: Max Verstappen isn’t done yet, and McLaren know it.
The four-time World Champion has chopped his deficit to 36 points with four race weekends left, a remarkable swing considering he was over 100 adrift of then-leader Oscar Piastri after Zandvoort. The tide’s turned since then — an upgraded Red Bull RB21, Verstappen back on a tear, and a wobble from Piastri — and suddenly we’ve got three drivers funneling into the final stretch with very different momentum. Lando Norris now leads after that dominant Mexico City Grand Prix win, but Herbert says both McLaren drivers can feel Verstappen’s breath on their necks.
“Verstappen has shown brilliance, but he has needed an improved Red Bull to get back into the race for the Championship,” Herbert told AdventureGamers. “There is a sheer brilliance that Max always shows. He’s always able to pull out those unbelievable qualifying laps and then have an absolutely storming race and dominate it. But you still need the car underneath you to be able to do that.”
It’s the familiar Verstappen formula, just delivered later in the year: get the car into a better window, then squeeze everything out of it. Red Bull’s late-season steps have been visible, and Verstappen’s been ruthless in cashing them in with wins and heavy points, while McLaren’s intra-team balance has flipped — Norris surging, Piastri off-color — giving the reigning champ a narrower target to aim at.
The math is still ugly for Red Bull. To nick a fifth title, Verstappen needs to average around 10 points per weekend more than both McLaren drivers. That’s a big number, and Mexico suggested the Norris/McLaren package isn’t exactly letting up. But Herbert’s not buying the idea that Verstappen is an outsider in anything but name.
“No, you can’t rule Max out, and I think you’d be a fool to rule him out,” he said. “I’m sure Lando, Oscar, and McLaren haven’t ruled him out because you always know there is a chance that he will be the guy who will beat you. Look what he did after the summer break: he went on that incredible run, and the points difference has come down considerably.”
Mexico offered a snapshot of why Red Bull still terrify rival pit walls. On a day when most front-runners ran the conventional strategy, Verstappen and Hannah Schmitz rolled the dice with a Medium-Soft plan. For a while, it looked like the wrong call. Then the pace came alive, Verstappen hunted down Charles Leclerc for second, and just as a DRS launch was being cued up, Carlos Sainz’s Williams kissed the wall, triggering yellow flags and a Virtual Safety Car that iced the move. Three points, gone with a marshal’s whistle.
“At one point, it looked as if that was one of the worst strategy calls that Red Bull has made,” Herbert noted. “He turned it around. He could have finished second but for that bizarre VSC.”
That’s the other element McLaren have to contend with: Red Bull’s willingness to zag. The team’s been unafraid to stray from the orthodox when the car needs a different kind of race to be competitive, and Verstappen’s temperament — icy, insistent — makes those calls look braver than they probably feel inside the cockpit. If this becomes a game of small margins on Sundays, he’s the driver you don’t want in your mirrors.
McLaren, for their part, seem determined to keep things clean between Norris and Piastri. No interference so far, no obvious team orders, and no sense they’ll tilt the table for one over the other. That’s admirable and, frankly, refreshing. It also opens the door for Verstappen to exploit any hesitation between the two if and when they’re wheel-to-wheel on a critical day.
Herbert’s hypothetical is hard to argue with: “If he were in a McLaren, would he be fighting for the championship? Absolutely.” The flip side is the truer test of champions — winning when the car isn’t the outright benchmark. Verstappen’s been doing that since late summer, and the gap has shrunk because of it.
So where does that leave us? Norris has the points, Piastri needs to steady the ship, and Verstappen’s stalking with a car that finally responds the way he wants. The runway is short, the required haul is steep, but we’ve seen enough late-season Red Bull revivals to know better than to call it. One messy McLaren weekend and this thing starts to look like a coin toss.
You can never rule out Red Bull. And you absolutely never rule out Max.
