Red Bull’s 2025 turnaround to become an unlikely dark horse in the Formula 1 drivers’ world championship is more important than actually winning the title, according to Max Verstappen.
It long seemed like the title fight was going to be a two-horse race between McLaren’s drivers Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris, who won 12 of the first 15 grands prix of the season between them.
At that stage, after the Dutch Grand Prix, Verstappen was 104 points down on Piastri, with his deficit to Norris 70 points.
But McLaren has won just two of the last eight rounds heading into Abu Dhabi, which has largely been down to errors from the team and its drivers, as well as Red Bull becoming more and more competitive.
Verstappen has taken five wins in that period and is just 12 points behind current leader Norris ahead of the Abu Dhabi showdown, with Piastri four points further in arrears.
Asked by Autosport whether that turnaround was even more important than the outcome of the title battle, the Red Bull racer replied: “Absolutely. That's very important, yes.
“The fact that we're still in the fight now has to do with several things, of course. But yes, this is in any case a much nicer situation than in the middle of this season, when things weren't going well and weren't consistent. Sometimes we had a good race, but then another very bad one. Now we're consistently back on the podium, so that's good."
Verstappen is currently on nine consecutive podiums – there have been just seven longer streaks in F1 history.
Did he ever lose confidence before that? “I didn't really lose confidence, but it's more that you think, ‘this season isn't what it should be’,” the Dutchman explained. “But that's when you're constantly discussing what you can change and what can be improved. And in the end, we found the right direction.”
As for his mentality ahead of the title decider, Verstappen makes it clear: “We have nothing to lose this weekend. Look, we are still in the championship battle, of course, but we also know very well where we have come from during this season.
“Thanks to how we ultimately approached things, we achieved good results again. But on the other hand, we also know that we still have some work to do to get back to the front. If you look at the constructors' standings, we are still a long way behind McLaren.”
Unlike most other teams, Red Bull decided that the aforementioned work entailed further effort on its 2025 challenger, which paved the way for this unlikely title bid, with the team adamant it won’t hamper its chances for F1’s new technical era in 2026 – if anything it should prove beneficial, according to Verstappen.
“The rules are completely different, but our tools and the way we look at the data, those things will still be the same next year,” he pointed out. “That's why it was important for us to validate those things by seeing if we could get even more performance out of this year's car.”
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