Helmut Marko: Verstappen needs a Norris stumble as Red Bull’s mid-season slump bites
Lando Norris now has one hand on the 2025 world title, and Helmut Marko isn’t sugarcoating why. The Red Bull advisor says that if Max Verstappen loses this fight, the damage was done in the post-Imola stretch when “little worked” for half a dozen races.
Verstappen trails Norris by 49 points with three Grands Prix and one Sprint still to run. That’s 83 points on the table, but it didn’t feel like 83 in Brazil. The Red Bull driver suffered a Q1 exit, took a grid penalty with an overnight engine change, and still produced a storming recovery from the pit lane to the podium. On most Sundays that would be headline stuff. This time it wasn’t enough because Norris swept both the Sprint and the Grand Prix to widen the gap.
The momentum swing started a week earlier in Mexico City. Verstappen qualified only fifth, half a second off a rampant Norris, and salvaged third in the race. “We’re not quick in every scenario,” Verstappen admitted then. Brazil underlined the point. He was fourth in the Sprint, mystified by the lack of grip, and forced into bold overnight changes that at least unlocked race pace. Norris simply had more.
“Forty-nine points behind with three races and a sprint — something has to happen with Lando to keep Max’s chances intact,” Marko said in his Speedweek column. “Otherwise we have no chance. A retirement or a collision — that’s the reality.”
It’s blunt, but he’s not wrong. The title arithmetic is stark. If Norris hits the Vegas jackpot with maximum points, Verstappen must finish second to keep the fight mathematically alive; third would end it there. If Norris is second, Verstappen needs at least fifth to cling on by a point. There are various permutations, but they all say the same thing: Max is playing goalie now, not striker.
Marko, though, isn’t tearing up the season report card. He’s keen to highlight the twist Red Bull did engineer after a ragged middle phase. “We turned the year around so massively that we were suddenly back in the title race. The overall situation is positive,” he said. But he also pinpointed where the championship may have slipped away. “If the title is ultimately lost, it’s in that period after Imola when little worked for about half a dozen races. Only one podium in seven — that’s where it went.”
That run forced Red Bull into a narrower set-up window, and Verstappen has been unusually vocal about the car’s unpredictability from track to track. He and the team found something to lean on in Brazil after changing the car overnight — the pit lane-to-podium surge was classic Max — but when McLaren’s ceiling is higher on the day, the Dutchman has been forced to play damage limitation.
The final three venues offer a thin sliver of hope. Vegas should play to Red Bull’s strengths, Marko reckons, with its full-throttle sections and long straights, while Qatar and Abu Dhabi’s medium-speed stuff looks friendlier to McLaren’s MCL39. Then again, the sport doesn’t really do “track specialists” anymore. Tyre prep, wind sensitivity and set-up execution have mattered far more this year than historic form, and Ferrari and Mercedes have spent the autumn throwing themselves into that mix with just enough menace to complicate everything.
There’s also the psychology of it. One year ago, Verstappen put the hammer down on Norris in Brazil and iced the title in Las Vegas. The roles have reversed. Norris has found the cold-blooded efficiency Verstappen perfected, and McLaren have given him a car with a wide operating range. Verstappen’s counterpunch has to land now, not later.
None of this means he’s finished. Few drivers convert a chaotic Saturday into a surgical Sunday like Verstappen, and if Norris stumbles even once, the dynamic changes fast. A Vegas win for Max with a Norris non-score slashes the gap to 24, and then Qatar becomes a very different conversation. But the margin for error is gone. Norris can keep the upper hand simply by staying out of trouble and collecting podiums.
So we head to Las Vegas with a champion who can’t afford another street fight with the set-up sheet and a challenger who’s made himself the surest bet in town. Verstappen needs the kind of weekend that used to be routine. Norris just needs to keep being boringly excellent.
The title race isn’t over. It’s just down to the last roll.
