Andrea Stella didn’t bother dressing it up. After a bruising Sunday in Baku, the McLaren team principal said the quiet part loudly: Max Verstappen is back in this title fight.
“Capital letters,” Stella smiled, leaning into the point he’d made all weekend. And who could argue? Verstappen stuck it on pole, controlled the Azerbaijan Grand Prix from the front and made it two wins on the bounce, trimming Oscar Piastri’s championship lead to 69 points with seven rounds left. That gap still looks chunky on paper. On the ground, Red Bull’s momentum feels anything but.
McLaren’s own weekend unraveled almost immediately. Both Piastri and Lando Norris brushed the walls in Q3, leaving them seventh and ninth on the grid while Verstappen sealed the prime real estate. Piastri’s race was over by Turn 5 on Lap 1 after a false start triggered anti-stall, dropping him to the back before he overcooked it and found the barriers. Norris brought home the only points — a hard-earned seventh — and spent much of his afternoon staring at the back of Yuki Tsunoda’s RB and Liam Lawson’s sister car.
“This was not a good day for both drivers,” Stella admitted. “Even if maximising things maybe we still couldn’t have beaten Max here, there was more in the car. There was a possibility to fight for podiums for both Oscar and Lando.”
That might sound optimistic after the fact, but Stella’s view is rooted in what McLaren expected pre‑weekend versus what they delivered. Baku’s long straights and fiddly traction zones were flagged as a potential weak spot; Singapore, next up, is where they expect to swing back.
More pressing for the bigger picture is Stella’s read on Red Bull. The team has looked sharper since Monza, and Stella believes that uptick isn’t simply down to a low-drag sweet spot. “They seemed to have made an improvement with their car,” he said of Red Bull’s Italian Grand Prix win. “They were fast in the corners — medium speed, low speed — and fast on the straights. And we know that Max, when he has a competitive car, can deliver strong weekends.”
It’s a warning delivered with the tone of a man who’s seen this movie. Red Bull won the first two races of the year, slipped as McLaren and others found form, and now look like they’ve reloaded. Baku underlined it. Verstappen was unbothered up front, the RB19B (or whatever they’re calling this evolution by now) balanced and quick where it counted. McLaren, meanwhile, had a slow-burn list of headaches: pace shortfalls, scruffy execution, and reliability niggles that cost Piastri time in practice.
So how does this change McLaren’s playbook? It doesn’t, really — it just narrows the tolerances. “When you race at the top of Formula 1 and the competition is so tight, you cannot afford errors,” Stella said. “Before it might have been Mercedes ready to take advantage, like in Canada. Max, at the start of the season. Red Bull won the first two races. Now they seem like they’ve found their way back. The margins to error reduce furthermore.”
If there was a silver lining for the team, it was Norris’ execution. He stayed out of trouble and made what points were there. But the reality was clear: he didn’t have the speed to attack the RBs ahead. “We did not offer Lando a car in condition to progress through the field,” Stella conceded. “He had a good race, he was clean, but there was not enough pace.”
Piastri, still leading the standings despite the DNF, left Baku with what his boss called “lots of learning.” The Aussie owned the mistake — too hot, too soon — and moved on quickly. It won’t soothe the sting of leaving empty‑handed when Verstappen banked maximum points, but it’s the sort of reset McLaren will need to hit immediately with Singapore on deck.
The stakes are obvious. Seven to go. A 69-point buffer can vanish fast if Red Bull’s uplift is real and McLaren keep wasting Saturdays and Sundays with unforced errors. Stella didn’t dodge that, either. “We also look at Max, because he’s definitely in the competition, and we look forward to races in which we can try and push Max back again.”
McLaren’s car has been one of the class acts of 2025 and, on balance, it still should be right there at Marina Bay and beyond. But Verstappen smells opportunity now, Red Bull look tidy again in more than one window, and the room for sloppiness just disappeared. If McLaren want to keep the upper hand, they need clean Fridays, crisp qualifying laps, bulletproof reliability — and they need both drivers in the fight every Sunday.
Capital letters or not, the message from Baku was blunt: Max is coming. McLaren can’t afford to blink.
