AUSTIN, Texas — As the writing on your rear-view mirror reads, objects are closer than they appear.
Given that, the rear-view mirrors at McLaren are filled with nothing but the RB21 of Max Verstappen.
The four-time Drivers’ Champion continued his drive for five over the weekend in Austin, securing pole position for both the F1 Sprint race as well as the United States Grand Prix, taking 33 of the maximum 33 points available to him, and closing to within 26 points of second-place Lando Norris, and 40 points of championship leader Oscar Piastri.
The weekend might have even turned Verstappen into a believer.
While he told the media after his win in the F1 Sprint race that he was simply taking his comeback attempt “race by race,” the Red Bull driver was singing a different tune on Sunday evening at the Circuit of the Americas.
“For sure, the chance is there,” admitted Verstappen after his win.
After the Dutch Grand Prix, won by Piastri with Verstappen finishing second, the Red Bull driver trailed by 104 points in the title chase.
Over the four race weekends since Zandvoort, Verstappen has trimmed more than 60 points off Piastri’s lead.
“We just need to try and deliver these kind of weekends now until the end. We’ll just try whatever we can. I think it is exciting and I’m just very excited to the end,” added Verstappen. “It was an unbelievable weekend for us. But I knew that the race was not going to be super-straightforward.
“I think if you look at the whole race, the pace between myself and Lando was really close. I think just in that first stint, that’s where we made the difference. I could eke out a little bit of a gap, and that’s basically what we kept ’til the end.
“It wasn’t easy to manage the tires on both of the stints, but we kept it in the lead. I’m just incredibly proud of everyone to deliver a weekend like this.”
For his part, Piastri declined to say that it was time for McLaren to prioritize either him or Norris in the title race, despite Verstappen’s late-season charge.
“We’re still so incredibly tight,” Piastri said to Sky Sports F1. “We’ve both said we wanted an opportunity to try and fight for the championship because we deserve it. I think it’s far too close to start picking one over the other.”
McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella, meeting with the media, kept a brave face as he reiterated once more that Verstappen is indeed a threat to take the Drivers’ Championship away from the McLaren duo.
“Understanding the circuits that we were going to face from Baku onwards, for me, there’s no mystery, and we know that when Max has the material to win, he becomes a very serious candidate to win,” said Stella Sunday evening in McLaren’s hospitality space.
”So it doesn’t change what our understanding of the situation is.
”It doesn’t change what we do.
“We just have to keep maximizing the performance and keep executing good weekends. And from this point of view, if you think about a race like Spa, we didn’t maximize the performance and we didn’t execute a perfect race,” continued Stella.
”So definitely we have a large opportunity, and the outcome of this season and the championship is in our hands.
”It’s not in someone else’s hands.
“That’s the mindset that we want to have, and that’s the mindset that we really have.”
Stella is right, and the math is on their side.
But as daylight fades here at the Circuit of the Americas, momentum is certainly on Verstappen’s.
