Sao Paulo Grand Prix: Lando Norris produces ‘champ’s weekend’ but Max Verstappen ‘shines bright’

If the championship had not taken such a decisive turn, the person who would be in the spotlight after Brazil would have been Verstappen. Even in these circumstances, the Dutchman was the best he has ever been, putting in one of the performances of his career.

A year ago, in this race, Verstappen put himself on the brink of a fourth world title after making a brilliant comeback from 17th on the grid to win.

It was one of the best trips ever, but it was in the rain, when these kinds of things are more possible.

On Sunday, in a dry race, Verstappen finished third after starting from the pit lane. Directly on the gearbox of Antonelli’s Mercedes, the car is in second place.

He did this despite suffering a puncture on lap six which forced him to stop early and dropped him from 13th place, from which he had recovered at the time, to the back straightaway.

“Unbelievable,” was the word Verstappen used to describe it. “He did a great job,” Antonelli said. “Exciting,” Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekes added.

What was most striking was that Red Bull lacked pace all weekend. Verstappen finished the race in fourth place and complained of a lack of control. He would have finished fifth had Piastri not crashed.

For the Grand Prix, Verstappen qualified only sixteenth, which is the first time in his entire career that he was eliminated in the first part of qualifying due to speed.

After realizing that the changes they had made to the car for qualifying had gone in the wrong direction, Red Bull elected to adjust the race settings. They stuck with the decision to abandon the new floorpan introduced in Mexico, but made a host of other modifications, including installing a new engine.

This contravenes the rules that stipulate that teams cannot change car settings once qualifying has begun; From here the pit lane begins.

In a way, even though the puncture put him back on track after putting up the six positions over the three laps of the race that had up to that point been possible between a real safety car and a virtual one, it did him a favor as it moved him off the hard tire and into the favourite.

Once the race got started properly, he began working his way through the field, to the point that by the time Norris stopped on lap 54, with 17 minutes to go, the person who inherited the lead was Verstappen.

“Not bad,” he said over the radio when his engineer, Gianpiero Lambiasi, informed him of this.

It looked like he might stay out of the race – and try to defend the lead – and in fact some rival engineers thought he should have done so. It would have been possible to win if Red Bull had committed early two laps down the middle of that first stop and Verstappen had managed his tires accordingly.

But Mikis disagreed, saying: “I don’t think there’s any way we could have gotten a P1 if you just looked at it.”

So did McLaren team principal Andrea Stella: “The level of degradation was so high, at some point I think the tires just ran out of rubber.”

“I think they knew at Red Bull that going to the finish with the same kit would be a big gamble, and given the fact that they had a new soft kit to wear, I think it was the right thing to do.”