Max Verstappen ended up just two points short of the title – but the Dutchman isn’t lamenting the missed opportunity and draws a curious comparison
Max Verstappen ended up just two tiny points short at the end of the 2025 Formula 1 season. But for the Red Bull driver, missing out on his fifth consecutive world championship title doesn’t really feel like a defeat. Lando Norris secured his first world championship title with third place in the season finale in Abu Dhabi, relegating the Dutchman to second place by the narrowest of margins.
After a tough first half of the season, Verstappen was already a whopping 104 points behind second-placed McLaren driver Oscar Piastri, who finished the season in third place, after the Dutch Grand Prix.
His unlikely comeback was based on setup improvements at Red Bull, while McLaren dropped points in a variety of ways: driving errors by Piastri, strategy blunders, a defect in Norris’ car at Zandvoort, and a double disqualification in Las Vegas due to excessive wear on the floor plate played into Verstappen’s hands.
“We never really had a chance”
Given Red Bull’s bleak outlook at the midpoint of the season—a crisis that even led to team principal Christian Horner being replaced by Laurent Mekies—Verstappen does not feel he has squandered a fifth title. Rather, he sees it as a stroke of luck to have come so close in the first place.
“Well, the way I see it, we didn’t really lose it because we were never really in it,” Verstappen told Dutch broadcaster Viaplay. “If you look at the whole season, we never really had a chance to compete.”
“Since there were two of them, they [the McLaren drivers] naturally took a lot of points away from each other. And when you’re on your own and things start to go better at some point, you naturally catch up a bit. A few accidents or strategy mistakes, disqualifications, and at some point you’re back in the game. I don’t really feel like we missed out on anything.”
Spain wasn’t the deciding factor
That’s why Verstappen doesn’t accept the loss of points at the Spanish Grand Prix as an excuse. There, he was penalized for a collision with Mercedes driver George Russell—it was the only obvious loss of points that was entirely within his own control.
“You know, I think we can be happy that we were able to fight for the championship at all,” he says, looking back on the incident in Barcelona. “First of all, we were never in the lead in the championship. Besides, we got a lot of gifts ourselves.”
“The championship was certainly not lost in Barcelona. You have to look more at where we had opportunities to keep up. And yes, of course there are always moments. I retired in Austria. But on the other hand, we had so many problems in so many races before that. Mistakes during pit stops, weekends where nothing went right. Looking back, there are many things that could have been done better.“
Verstappen draws a pragmatic conclusion: ”And finally, McLaren was disqualified in Las Vegas. If that hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t even be in the race anymore. So it depends on how you look at it.“
”In the end, it doesn’t matter if it’s one point, half a point, or twenty points. Not winning is not winning. Either you’re pregnant or you’re not. You can’t be a little bit pregnant, right?”