Timo Glock: ‘You feel the nerves’ at McLaren as Verstappen hauls Piastri back into play
What looked like a measured march to Oscar Piastri’s first world title has turned into a chase. Max Verstappen is the one doing the hunting, and Timo Glock reckons McLaren can feel it.
Four race weekends. That’s all it’s taken for Verstappen to rip 66 points out of Piastri’s lead and turn a 104-point cushion into a 40-point headache. The Red Bull driver has taken 101 of a possible 108 points across Monza, Baku, Singapore and Austin — a run capped by a COTA clinic where he stuck it on pole, won the Sprint and then controlled the Grand Prix. It’s the kind of form that doesn’t just swing momentum; it tightens stomachs up and down a pit wall.
“[Piastri’s] insecure,” Glock, now a Sky Deutschland pundit, said after Austin. “In his third year in Formula 1, he is in a situation where the pressure is growing. The free driving from the beginning of the year is no longer so easy.”
You don’t have to squint to see what he means. Piastri has managed just 37 points in the same four-race stretch: third at Monza, a first-lap crash and DNF in Baku, fourth in Singapore and fifth in Austin, plus a Sprint race wiped out at Turn 1. The lead is still intact, the maths still on his side, but the trend line is pointing the wrong way with five rounds to go.
Piastri, for his part, played it cool in Texas. He said he’d “rather be where I am than the other two” and argued that if he and McLaren find their pace again, the rest will look after itself. That’s the right answer when you’re still the one with the number everyone else is trying to chase. But it doesn’t change the temperature in the room.
“The nervousness is there for the whole team,” Glock continued. “There are tracks where Mercedes is suddenly there, Ferrari was strong here. That’s the problem for Oscar and Lando, that other teams can take points away from them. For me, Max Verstappen is too dominant for anyone to put him under pressure.”
That last line is the one that bites. Verstappen hasn’t just been quick; he’s been ruthlessly tidy. The RB21 looks planted, Red Bull look dialled in, and the champion looks like a man who’s decided the season isn’t done with him yet. He admitted as much on Sunday night in Austin: “For sure, the chance is there. We just need to try and deliver these kind of weekends now until the end.”
If you’re McLaren, the issue isn’t simply raw pace — they’ve had plenty of that this year. It’s the operational sharpness under stress, the tiny decisions that balloon under pressure: when to cover an undercut, how hard to lean on out-laps, who blinks first on tyres. Sprinkle in Sprints, start scrums and a congested front group featuring Mercedes and Ferrari on their good days, and those decisions snowball fast.
Piastri’s season to date has been built on the fundamentals: high qualifying peaks, clean racecraft, and a calm radio even when the car’s on a knife-edge. Over the last month, that calm has been harder to project. A first-lap tangle in Baku, a scrappy Sprint in Austin, and a couple of Sundays where McLaren’s speed advantage evaporated just enough to invite trouble. Nothing catastrophic. Just not title-winner tidy.
Verstappen’s surge reframes everything. The gap is still 40, but the psychology flips when the chaser is hoovering up points and the leader is managing weekends. McLaren need a reset — not a reinvention — and they need it fast. Getting Piastri’s Saturdays back to their menace would be the start; clear air on Sunday solves a lot.
The most compelling part of this fight? It’s not a familiar Verstappen-versus-Hamilton rerun, nor a straight McLaren intra-team tug-of-war. It’s a 24-year-old in his first real title push learning to carry the weight of being the target, against a four-time champion who knows exactly how to turn the screws. Piastri says there’s “still a long way to go” and he’s right — five race weekends is an eternity when you’re on the right roll and an eye-blink when you’re not.
McLaren have built a car and a season good enough to lead the World Championship deep into October. Now comes the part that decides whether they lift it. Settle the nerves. Cut the errors. Keep Verstappen at arm’s length. Easy to write, hard to execute — especially with the guy in the RB21 smelling blood.
