Verstappen banks double P3 on Friday as Red Bull’s late-season push hits Singapore
Max Verstappen doesn’t win practice sessions and throw a parade. He logs laps, takes stock, and goes again. But two tidy P3s under Singapore’s floodlights on Friday will have raised a few eyebrows — and arguably a few heart rates over at McLaren.
The reigning champion, winless in Marina Bay across his career, ended both FP1 and FP2 third on the sheets and sounding pretty upbeat about it. “It was not too bad,” Verstappen said, in that familiar understatement that usually disguises something sharper. “FP1 started quite nicely… the car was not too bad, a bit like the last two weekends where there were no major problems.” The trend line is the story here: since Red Bull rolled out its major floor update for the RB21 at Monza, the car has gone from prickly to predictable. In Verstappen’s hands, that’s a dangerous swing.
It’s shown in the results. After the summer belonged to McLaren’s Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris, Verstappen has landed back-to-back wins at the last two rounds, trimming his deficit to championship leader Piastri from a daunting 104 points to a still-meaningful 69. That’s not nothing, especially for a driver who tends to make momentum stick. The question following him into Singapore this week has been simple: can he make this a title fight again?
Friday didn’t answer it, but it nudged the door open. The RB21 looked planted and pliable through the street circuit’s nastier compressions, and Verstappen’s tone matched the car. “In FP2, a few things that we tried — some were good,” he added. “We just need to optimize that a bit more. Overall, quite satisfied, but definitely need a bit more pace to fight up at the front tomorrow.”
That’s about as bullish as he gets on a Friday. Crucially, he didn’t sound like a driver hunting for miracles. “Still a few things we want to do better, but it’s not like we need to throw around the setup completely,” he told F1TV. Around Singapore, “tiny details” matter — his words — and he listed them off: nudging front and rear grip into the window, and keeping tyre temps under control across a lap that loves to cook rubber if you lean too hard, too early.
Qualifying will tell us more. Marina Bay tends to exaggerate engine modes and traffic games on Friday, and Verstappen knows it. “FP2 is a bit difficult to say. People are running engine modes, top-speed-wise, I guess we’ll see in qualifying.” The last two weekends, he needed time to key into the car before uncorking the lap when it counted. Here, he’s started closer to the sharp end. That’s “definitely very positive,” he said.
The broader context, of course, is the championship. No one inside the Red Bull garage is pretending a 69-point gap disappears by wishing, and Verstappen is keen to keep the temperature low. There’s no pressure talk, no last-stand speeches — just the same refrain he offered Thursday: race by race. Stack enough of those and the picture changes quickly. With Norris hovering as the nearest target in the standings before Piastri, there’s an obvious step-one, step-two logic to any late-season charge.
None of this erases history. Singapore has been Verstappen’s white whale — form, fortune, and the odd safety car rarely lining up. But if there’s a weekend to finally crack it, this kind of quiet, controlled Friday is how it starts. The car responds, the driver’s content, and the hunt for a tenth here and a hair there becomes the only job on Saturday.
It’s worth noting that the field around him had a messy evening, which flatters no one and tells you little. What matters is Verstappen’s baseline looked robust without him having to hustle or lean into the walls. If Red Bull find that extra lick overnight, the lead orange on the grid could be a McLaren or a Red Bull — and for the first time in months, that feels like an honest toss-up rather than wishful thinking.
Write him off at your peril. We’ve seen how that ends.
