It’s advantage Max Verstappen. In the biggest qualifying session of the 2025 season, the four-time world champion produced two supreme laps to head the McLarens of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri.
The current world champion knows the reality is that he must win the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix and hope Norris finishes fourth or lower to make it title No 5.
Norris had dominated the preceding practice sessions but failed to perfect a flying lap and yet he has his main title rival in his sights starting on the front row alongside him for the 58-lap season finale, with Piastri in third.
Verstappen will undeniably be going all out for the win but admitted: “We need a bit of luck for what’s happening behind us.” Ideally for the Dutchman, that is chaos involving the two McLarens, who will be reminded if needed by the team hierarchy what is at stake going into turn one at Yas Marina.
And yet Abu Dhabi has a penchant for end-of-season dramatics. It was here in 2021 where Verstappen won the first of his world titles in controversial fashion on the last lap of the entire season. And going further back to 2010, it was at Yas Marina that four drivers still had a mathematical chance of winning the drivers’ championship. On that occasion, Sebastian Vettel eclipsed the other three in the race, Fernando Alonso, Mark Webber and Lewis Hamilton for the opener in his quartet of titles. Vettel had been the third-placed man in the championship standings going into the decider, just like Piastri, who is perhaps aptly being managed by his Australian compatriot Webber.
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Third on the grid and 16 points behind Norris, he is very much the outsider in the title race, but could potentially be able to aid Norris’s cause should he find himself between the championship’s top two when it comes to the later stages of the race.
McLaren have made it clear all season that they have not wanted to decide races by team orders and to give both their drivers an equal shot while they are still in the title race.
In Piastri’s native Australia, the media has been awash with conspiracy theories that Norris, previously managed by McLaren CEO Zak Brown, is being given preferential treatment.
But the reality is McLaren have tried to be scrupulously fair under the ethos of “papaya rules”. The approach – an admirable one – is to let their drivers decide things themselves on track. They have occasionally tripped themselves up in this perpetual quest for equality and, in truth, one of their drivers should have wrapped up the championship some time ago.
It has been a rollercoaster, marathon 24-race season. McLaren had the quickest car from the get go, everyone else desperately trailing in their wake. First, it was Piastri’s championship to lose as he raced into a lead, cool, calm and collected at every race weekend.
Then as if a switch had been flicked, his form escaped him and Norris, who had struggled in the early part of the season with the handling of his car, suddenly turned into the form man.
He seemed just a few laps away from a maiden world title only to be undone by events at the past two race weekends. First, McLaren suffered a double disqualification in Las Vegas when the skid blocks on the underside of their cars were measured to be too thin. It equated to the equivalent of the width of a hair, but rules are rules.
And then in Qatar they made a heinous error by failing to bring in both drivers when the safety car was deployed on lap seven and everyone else pitted. It cost Piastri the win and both drivers serious points. But it brings us all beautifully to Abu Dhabi for a title decider and a case of who blinks first.
Verstappen has looked comfortably the coolest of the trio, consistently making the point that he has nothing to lose. He used the drivers’ press conference to reiterate that and pointed to the drivers’ championship trophy to say that as he already had four at home, a fifth would make little difference.
In contrast, in one breath Norris said a title win would not change his life while saying seconds later that he had worked his whole life to get to this moment.
Verstappen remembers well the pressure of the season decider in 2021, and the prospect of a first world title. The nerves for the papaya-clad drivers will be infinitely worse than for their rival. That Verstappen is still in this title is nothing short of a miracle. Red Bull had looked in disarray on and off the track, the RB21 a race winner one weekend and an also-ran the next. Then came the seismic change when Christian Horner, team principal for Red Bull, was surprisingly sacked after the British Grand Prix.
While his successor has refused to take any credit, Laurent Mekies has overseen a remarkable turnaround from the Italian Grand Prix at the start of September. Before that race, Verstappen was 104 points off the lead in the drivers’ standings. Now, that’s down to 12.
After struggling once more in practice, he saved his best again for a qualifying session that delivered the three-way fight between the title protagonists. Verstappen’s Red Bull team-mate Yuki Tsunoda sneaked into the final session and was able to give the defending champion a tow to move him to top of the timesheets. But without his team-mate, he went quicker still on his second flying lap to be two-tenths quicker than Norris and onto pole for the 48th time in his career.
Photograph by Mark Sutton/Formula 1 via Getty Images