What Max Verstappen really thinks of his F1 title…

Max Verstappen believes that – barring any drama at McLaren – he needed to win the Singapore Grand Prix to have any serious shot at the 2025 F1 title. According to the Dutchman, that victory was within reach for Red Bull.

With six race weekends remaining, Verstappen trails championship leader Oscar Piastri by 63 points. McLaren team boss Andrea Stella said in Baku that all media should write in capital letters that Verstappen is still a “serious threat” for the F1 title, but the Red Bull driver himself isn’t going that far.

In Singapore, he jokingly said the chances of him winning it are 50%, something he repeated in Texas: “You either win or you don’t. It’s fifty-fifty – that's how simple it is.”

During his Dutch media round in the Austin paddock, Verstappen shed some more light on his title chances. In his view, he should have won the Singapore Grand Prix to make the fight with both McLaren drivers truly exciting.

Asked whether it gives him hope that the McLaren pairing keeps taking points off each other, the reigning world champion replied: “But then we really should have won in Singapore. Now we’re just not catching enough points.”

Verstappen bases himself on simple maths – he needs to gain more than ten points per race weekend, but in Singapore he only closed six points on Piastri. It’s worth noting that he did finish ahead of both McLarens on a track that, on paper, didn’t suit the RB21 at all.

“That was definitely a positive, yes. But in the end, we just didn’t make up enough points.” Even when Motorsport.com asked directly whether he truly believes he needed the Singapore win for a fifth world title, Verstappen replied: “Yes, that would have helped, 100%.”

Max Verstappen finished second in Singapore (Photo by: Zak Mauger / LAT Images via Getty Images)

Could Verstappen and Red Bull have won in Singapore?

In Verstappen’s opinion, the win was within reach for Red Bull in Singapore. McLaren wasn’t as dominant as expected, meaning opportunities were there. After the race under the floodlights, Verstappen immediately admitted that Red Bull hadn’t maximised its weekend – a view he still stands by. It partly came down to a setup change made before qualifying that didn’t have the intended effect.

“I think, based on how we started the race weekend, it would have been better like that,” he said. “But those choices were made as a team. Looking back, we were just a bit too conservative, I think.”

The start didn’t help either, although Verstappen said there wasn’t much he could have done about it. Red Bull opted for soft tyres and a so-called ‘low grip’ setting for the start, as rain had fallen just before the grid procedure. By lights out, however, the track had dried – raising questions about the wisdom of Red Bull's decision. But according to Verstappen, there wasn’t a better option available:

“No, otherwise I would have had too much wheel spin. There was 8% less grip on the inside line, so I basically lost a car length straight away. That was the problem, and that’s why we started on softs and chose that low-grip setting off the line.”

Can Red Bull challenge McLaren again in Austin?

Austin presents a completely different challenge. After its recent form in Monza, Baku, and Singapore, Red Bull does seem to have made a step forward overall – though Verstappen stressed there are still “no guarantees” that the team will be competitive everywhere. The Circuit of the Americas features many medium-speed corners – the very type in which “McLaren killed Red Bull in Zandvoort”, to quote team boss Laurent Mekies.

“In Singapore, it was obviously better than that, but our medium-speed performance was still not good enough compared to McLaren,” Verstappen said. “We still need to make improvements, and hopefully we can do that here.”

The positive is that Red Bull now understands its car better than before, which also helps with this weekend's sprint format. “I think we generally know what to do with the car. It’s more about how we extract the maximum from a race weekend. That’s the key for us now, as we need everything to take points away from McLaren.”

Those final words underline that Verstappen has his eyes on McLaren – a notable shift given that earlier this year he called a title fight completely unrealistic. “We’re at least going to try. If you already say, ‘Forget about it,’ then I might as well not race. And there’s no other goal to fight for, right? The gap behind me is more than fifty points, so we’ll at least try and give it a proper go.”