Oscar Piastri can still win the F1 drivers’ championship, but Verstappen is now stalking the McLarens

3 hours ago 2

McLaren has consistently and emphatically declared they do not have a No.1 driver in this Formula 1 season.

Their well-documented papaya rules – which enforce clean racing – were designed to give championship rivals and teammates Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri the chance to compete fairly for the title, without intervention.

McLaren has secured the constructors’ championship but the battle for the driver’s trophy has narrowed.

For the first half of the F1 calendar, the sacred papaya text worked a treat.

McLaren’s undisputed dominance secured 11 grand prix wins from the 14 opening races, with Mercedes and Red Bull sneaking onto the podium occasionally.

McLaren has negotiated bristling tensions between Norris and Piastri over swapped places, slow pit stops and occasional collisions fairly smoothly, comforted by the fact the championship race remained an internal two-horse battle.

That is no longer the case.

Max Verstappen wins the US Grand Prix, eating away at McLaren’s dominance in the driver’s championship.

Four-time world champion Max Verstappen has become a looming presence and external threat to McLaren’s hopes of securing a driver’s championship, solidified by his win in the United States Grand Prix on Monday morning (AEST).

In front of a roaring cowboy hat-clad Texan crowd, the Dutchman coolly converted pole position to victory, leading every single lap and securing his 68th grand prix win.

A valiant Norris – who fiercely battled Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc for half the race – finished second, while Piastri had to settle for fifth.

It was a nightmare weekend for the McLaren drivers who suffered a double DNF during Saturday’s sprint race. Piastri’s wheel clipped Nico Hulkenberg’s Sauber, an accidental contact which sent the Australian hurtling into his teammate.

The incident happened weeks after Norris nudged Piastri towards the trackside wall after hitting the back of Verstappen’s car in Singapore, with McLaren warning there would be “repercussions”.

McLaren CEO Zak Brown said the sprint race collision was “a brutal day in the office”, conceding the team would review everything that happened.

Verstappen won the sprint race for the third year in a row, adding to his growing list of recent triumphs in the latter half of the season, including the Italian and Azerbaijan grands prix.

Piastri still leads the championship race by 14 points, ahead of Norris. However, Verstappen only sits 40 points away from Piastri and 26 points behind Norris – that’s almost the equivalent of just one race win (25 points).

It’s been more than seven weeks since a McLaren driver won a grand prix and in the past five rounds, Verstappen (119) has scored the same number of points as the McLaren drivers combined (Piastri 62, Norris 57).

Verstappen is a feasible contender to win the championship and he knows it.

The Red Bull star smiled when Sky Sports’ commentator Martin Brundle described his race as a “champion’s drive”.

“It was an unbelievable weekend for us ... I knew the race was not going to be super straightforward,” he said.

“You must be thinking, I can do this, there’s a chance,” Brundle said to him.

“Yes for sure there’s a chance there,” Verstappen replied.

“We just need to deliver these kinds of weekends until the end.”

Known for a sometimes tense relationship with media, Verstappen has been reserved and borderline nonchalant about his chances of winning the championship all year, shrugging off reporters’ previous questions about retaining his title.

Oscar Piastri is remaining optimistic despite finishing in fifth place at the US Grand Prix.

The press conference in Texas marked a noticeable shift in attitude: a revived Red Bull under new team principal Laurent Mekies can compete for the drivers’ championship, and more importantly, potentially force McLaren’s hand in selecting a driver to focus all their attention on.

Ex-Formula 1 team boss Guenther Steiner recently spoke at Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre, where he said McLaren could “overthink” things and needed to make a call soon.

“That’s the danger here – Max can move up. To make sure a McLaren driver wins it, at some stage, and I think it is pretty soon, they have to make the decision to support the driver which is in front, which is obviously Oscar,” he said.

Piastri hasn’t won a race since the Dutch Grand Prix on August 31 and hasn’t finished on the podium the past three races.

However, the Australian driver said it was still “too close” to pick a No.1 driver.

“I don’t know… I don’t think so,” he said shifting uncomfortably when asked in an interview.

“We’re still so incredibly tight, and we’ve both said we want an opportunity to try and fight for the championship because we deserve it, so I think it’s far too close to start picking one over the other.”

The next race is less than a week away in Mexico City, where Verstappen has five career victories at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez. If Verstappen triumphs again, Piastri’s perception of what is “too close” may change.

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