‘Max is ridiculous’: Ricciardo salutes Verstappen as Austin masterclass tightens title chase
Max Verstappen didn’t so much win the United States Grand Prix as he put it in a headlock and walked it to the flag. Sprint win on Saturday, lights-to-flag on Sunday, 33 points in the bag, and a championship picture that suddenly looks a lot less comfortable for McLaren.
Oscar Piastri managed only 10 points across the weekend. The net effect: Verstappen slashes the gap to 40 and reminds everyone that pressure is a language he speaks fluently. Lando Norris remains ahead of him in the standings too, but only by 26. For a driver who thrives on momentum, this was a full tank.
It was the sort of performance that brings out the paddock poets. “Watching Max is history in the making,” said team boss Laurent Mekies, who has seen enough lap traces to know when the numbers don’t lie. “He surprises us every time he goes out on track… how much he’s pushing us between sessions, how much sensitivity he has in things we sometimes can and sometimes cannot see.”
Even rival brass couldn’t help but tip the cap. McLaren CEO Zak Brown offered the diplomatic applause and then the challenge: congratulations, yes; now, how do we stop them?
If you want the most Daniel Ricciardo take on Verstappen’s Sunday stroll, you got it. The Australian, who shared a garage with Verstappen from 2016 to 2018 and later returned to Red Bull’s junior team in the twilight of his career, didn’t bother pretending this was complicated. “Max is ridiculous. Kid’s so good,” he told fans, adding with a wink that the No. 1 car could’ve been phoning in a steak order — medium rare, naturally — while everyone else scrambled for plan B in Austin.
There’s some truth behind the cheek. Verstappen was metronomic at COTA: controlled start, ruthless out-laps, and the kind of tyre whispering that suffocates strategy variance. Even when the gaps looked manageable on the timing screens, the body language of the race wasn’t. He owned it. He’s owned a lot of Sundays lately, actually — three victories in the last four grands prix — and the arc of the season has snapped back towards him at precisely the wrong time for those in papaya.
The sub-plot with the sharpest edges lives in the other Red Bull seat. Yuki Tsunoda didn’t operate on Verstappen’s planet in Texas, but he did something Red Bull value when the heat rises: he banked. Seventh in the Sprint, seventh in the grand prix, and up to 28 points on the year — his first double points haul across a Sprint weekend as a Red Bull driver. “Two days in a row he’s come through nicely,” Ricciardo noted, a nod from a man who knows the grind of clawing from the midfield to the top eight.
Helmut Marko says the team will lock in its 2026 pairing after Mexico, a sentence that tends to sharpen focus for anyone in the conversation. Tsunoda’s trajectory this season has been quietly upward, his racecraft tidier, his radio calmer, his Sundays more productive. Is it enough? That’s Red Bull — and only Red Bull — math. But weekends like Austin don’t hurt.
Back at the front, Verstappen’s title push is now less about what he’s doing and more about what McLaren aren’t. Piastri’s Austin was strangely subdued. Norris extracted what he could, but neither had an answer for Verstappen’s cruise-control relentlessness. And the calendar doesn’t promise mercy. When Verstappen smells blood after a weekend like this, he typically keeps chewing.
There’s also the small matter of legacy ticking away in the background. The Dutchman is hunting a fifth straight World Championship, and performances like Austin won’t just add points — they add certainty. This was the old familiar Max: cool under the visor, brutal on the stopwatch, and annoyingly efficient at blunting everyone else’s story.
Ricciardo, now watching from the other side of the fence, summed up the vibe perfectly. He knows what peak Verstappen looks like. He helped build parts of that edifice back in the day, trading sector times inside a Red Bull that sometimes only two drivers on earth could truly stretch. If he’s telling you this is ridiculous, he means it as the highest compliment. And he’s probably right.
McLaren’s response now needs bite, not platitudes. Slowing Verstappen’s momentum is a tactical and psychological game — use the Sprint format when it favors you, pin him on an offset, risk the undercut even if the model frowns. Because if you let Max run the script, you get what Austin served up: the champion on clear track, checking mirrors, and maybe, just maybe, thinking about dinner. Medium rare.
