Verstappen's 'positive pressure' as he goes 'flat out' for fifth title

For the first time all year, Max Verstappen said after the United States Grand Prix that winning the world championship was a real possibility.

It felt like a significant moment, because until now Verstappen has been dismissing the idea.

That made sense during McLaren's imperious form from the beginning of the year to the end of the summer.

Even when Verstappen started winning races in September, the points gap to the McLaren drivers was so big that the four-time champion refused to entertain the idea in public, even if he might have been thinking about it in private. He was taking it race by race, he said, and not thinking about the championship.

Verstappen said the same thing at the start of the weekend in Austin, even though he had won two of the past three grands prix and finished second in the other. A McLaren had not finished ahead of him since the Dutch Grand Prix at the end of August.

After a race weekend in which Verstappen took pole and victory in both the sprint and grand prix itself, he could have said it again. He might even have been expected to. But the belief in him now was almost palpable.

"For sure, the chance is there," Verstappen said. "We just need to try and deliver these kind of weekends to the end. We will try. It is exciting.

"Of course we know we need to be perfect to the end of the season to have a chance, but we will try, and if we succeed, of course amazing.

"If we don't, we tried everything we could to the end and we kept it exciting. That's the spirit for us. It's positive pressure. It's not putting anything on us. We're not stressed about it. We're just going flat out."

The statistics of the last four races over the past month and a half are quite remarkable.

After the Dutch Grand Prix, Verstappen was 104 points behind McLaren's Oscar Piastri in the championship, and 70 adrift of Lando Norris. Now, he is 40 points behind the Australian, whose lead over his team-mate has been cut to just 14 points.

Verstappen expressed his own incredulity at what he had achieved. If someone had told him after Zandvoort this would happen, he said, "I would have told him he was an idiot.

"But we found a good way with the car. It's simple as that. Of course, we put some upgrades on the car, but we just understood our car a bit better, where we wanted it to perform better."

A 64-point gain in four races tells its own story, but how it has come about is just as remarkable.

McLaren trounced Red Bull through the summer races in Europe - until the Italian Grand Prix in early September, when an upgraded floor and front wing finally gave Verstappen the balance he had been craving all year.

Since then, the Red Bull has been the fastest car. Until this weekend in Austin, that could have been explained away through circuit characteristics - Monza, Baku and Singapore are all short, slow corners, and require good braking and traction.

The McLaren's strengths are not in this area - they are in long-duration, medium-speed corners, where they crush everyone else.

But Austin is a "normal" circuit, a road course not a street circuit, not a high-speed outlier like Monza, with a good range of corners. And Verstappen won again.

There are five races left, two of them sprint events. If he keeps closing on the McLaren drivers at the rate he has been, he will win a fifth consecutive title, it's as stark and simple as that.

There are circuits to come that play to McLaren's strengths - Brazil, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, the team have singled out.

But Verstappen's recent form brings everything into question.

On Saturday in Austin, McLaren team principal Andrea Stella was saying that the Verstappen-Red Bull combination could be the fastest at every remaining track this year.

By Sunday, though, Stella's tone in public had become more positive. He was encouraged, he said, by the fact that Norris "had the pace to win the race today".

This, Stella said, had been proved on the few laps Norris was able to run his pace. Verstappen agreed.

"As soon as Lando was in clean air," the Dutchman said, "it was very evenly matched or he was slightly faster. We managed to gap to the end but it was not super-easy."

Norris' problem was that he spent the vast majority of the race stuck behind Ferrari's Charles Leclerc.

Ferrari were the only team to pick the right strategy. Leclerc started on soft tyres, which gave him the grip off the line to pass Norris into the first corner.

Most teams started on the mediums, expecting the race to be a one-stop on the medium and hard tyres. But it soon became apparent in the first stint that the cars who had started on hards were struggling.

Leclerc held Norris back for the entire first stint. He pitted first, fitting the medium tyres, while the McLaren driver stayed out on his mediums. When Norris finally pitted, fitting the softs instead of the hards that had been the plan at the start of the race, he emerged behind Leclerc again, inevitably.

He expected to be able to pass relatively easily, but although he caught the Ferrari quickly, Leclerc fended him off again. Norris backed off to cool his tyres and had another go, and it was not until five laps from the end that he was finally able to claim second place.

Had he held on to it at the start, the race could have been very different. "Performance-wise," Stella said, "we are reassured that the pace was sufficient to fight for the victory."

This was especially encouraging because the crash between the McLaren drivers that had taken them both out of the sprint on the first lap had cost them valuable learning.

That meant McLaren had had to be conservative with their set-up, especially in terms of ride height, because they lacked the necessary data on a track where other teams have in the past been caught out by the bumps and been disqualified for excessive floor wear.

McLaren had to err on the side of caution, and it inevitably cost them performance. Hence the encouragement from the fact that, despite that compromise, they were nevertheless competitive in the race.

As Verstappen closes on both McLaren drivers, so Norris has been closing on Piastri - he was 34 points behind his team-mate after Zandvoort; he has now reduced that by more than half.

Piastri finished behind Norris in Monza, had a very poor weekend in Baku, and lost out in Singapore when Norris barged past him at the first corner.

This weekend was different. He lacked pace from the off, never comfortable with the car, always lagging about 0.2secs behind his team-mate.

"I don't think there's an overwhelming trend that things are in a bad way," Piastri said. "It's just that this weekend has been has been tough. So we'll try and understand why that was the case. And try and bounce back next week."

He denied that the pressure was getting to him.

"No, I don't think so," Piastri said. "The pressure has been there the whole year. This weekend, I didn't really feel like I made any mistakes. It just wasn't very fast.

"There's some weekends where it just doesn't click for you. And this was one of those. When you feel like you've done a reasonable job and just the pace hasn't been there, I don't think that's really what pressure looks like.

"I've been in fights that were as close or at this point even closer than what they are now. So I've got the evidence for myself that things can still turn out well and I still fully believe that I can win the championship.

"There's still a long way to go in the championship. Max has obviously chased it down pretty quick, but it's not exactly a small gap with five rounds to go.

"Ultimately, if we can find our way again, find our pace, certainly for me find our pace again, then I don't have any major concerns."

Norris, Piastri and McLaren as a whole are heading into new territory.

The drivers and the team have not fought for a drivers' title before, although Norris threatened Verstappen last year. The only exception is Stella, who is the veteran of many close battles, when he was race engineer for Michael Schumacher, Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso at Ferrari.

His job now is to keep the team and drivers on an even keel, to try to brush off the pressure and focus on the job in hand.

"We keep talking about the fact that what we are facing in this moment - which is a tight competition to win races, a tight competition in the quest for the drivers' championship - is what Formula 1 is about," Stella said.

"If anything, it was anomalous when we were doing easily P1, P2, like in Barcelona, in Bahrain, and some other places. That's not what Formula 1 is about.

"It's a process of getting used to this kind of pressure, which we want to live with maximum intensity and minimum stress.

"We don't want to lose the joy of doing what we do. We just want to make sure that we put ourselves in the state in which we perform at our best, which also includes having fun and keeping recognising that ultimately it's quite a big privilege to be in this situation.

"And it's a privilege that came thanks to the good work that McLaren, the team, the two drivers, have been able to do.

"So what we do in the future is very easy. We keep doing the good work and the results will take care of themselves."