Towards the back end of the 2024 Formula 1 season, once Max Verstappen had put the drivers’ championship properly out of reach for Lando Norris, we debated what Norris needed to do to go one better in 2025.
Beyond the nitpicking we did over the tactical imbalance between them created by Red Bull’s early 2024 dominance, or Norris being a bit behind the curve when it comes to hard racing against the hardest racer on the F1 grid, the other thing we discussed is whether Norris would need to rely on a car advantage over the full course of a season to actually beat Verstappen.
Norris has spoken consistently about Verstappen in almost reverent terms - calling him “the best driver in the world” repeatedly. In many ways this is understandable - Verstappen has been in F1 four seasons more, started almost twice the number of grands prix Norris has (210 vs 129), won 12 times more F1 races than Norris (63 vs 5), and has four more world championships to his name to boot.
But perhaps more significant than the pure numbers at play here is the psychological advantage they afford Verstappen. Like all top racing drivers, Norris absolutely thinks he can get the job done. And there’s absolutely no doubting his pure speed behind the wheel. But there’s a difference between thinking you can do something and knowing you can do it.
The difference between them is that Verstappen knows.
And the first race of 2025 indicates our theory from last season could be stress tested in reality. McLaren has clearly started this season with a car advantage - or certainly a tyre-use advantage - which translated into several tenths of a second in dry conditions around a hot Albert Park.
On a drying circuit in the race that advantage helped the McLarens pull away from Verstappen’s Red Bull, whereas in the properly wet phases of the grand prix he looked a serious threat. Really, he had no business finishing second in that race, within a second of victory.
That’s not to knock the job Norris did across the first race weekend of 2025 - he took pole position in the fastest car and converted that into victory, absolutely as he should have done.
He’s perhaps fortunate his own off at Turn 12 in the race didn’t leave him facing a similar fate to his team-mate, but when you’re first on the scene for a sudden downpour on slick tyres that can’t really be held against you.
Norris drove very well all weekend and was absolutely a deserving winner.
And yet it’s difficult to entirely escape the feeling that Verstappen drove… better…
He qualified closest of anyone to the McLarens, which everyone seems to agree found a sweet spot with the C5 Pirelli tyres in Melbourne that gave them great tyre warm-up but also low degradation - where normally, as Red Bull boss Christian Horner put it, “one comes at the expense of the other”.
Verstappen also put them under serious pressure at the start and end of the race. Even during the races’s pivotal moment of peak stress, when both McLarens went off and Norris made the split decision to pit immediately and surrender track position for intermediate tyres, there was an added calmness to the way Verstappen sounded on the radio as he gambled on staying out on slicks for a bit longer.
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That gamble didn’t pay off, but it wouldn’t have taken much and suddenly we’d be discussing an unlikely Verstappen victory against the odds rather than Norris just about getting the job done in a chaotic race in a superior McLaren.
You always have the sense Verstappen just won’t ever go away. Even when McLaren is enjoying a clear advantage, Verstappen will be there - calmly sniping and just waiting for his opening.
He drives with an inner confidence that just isn’t apparent to the same degree in his rival. As good a performance as this undoubtedly was from Norris - being the favourite, the one being chased, and dealing with all the pressure moments that entailed and that the circumstances of this race created - there were still significant portions where he didn’t necessarily look like the best-performing McLaren driver, nevermind the outright best performer on the grid.
Throughout F1 history there have been periods where one driver either stood out above the rest, or had to fight a handful of the others to be considered the best of their era.
Alain Prost was that guy for a portion of the 1980s, Ayrton Senna took the mantle from him - then died before he could have that wrestled away by Michael Schumacher. Fernando Alonso took it off Schumacher, then sort of gave it to Lewis Hamilton, who pretty much held onto it for the next 13 years - with brief interludes from Sebastian Vettel while Alonso too often toiled in cars not quite worthy of his talent.
In the late-1980s and early-90s, when Prost faced Senna, Senna was very much the coming man. Their 1990 battle (Ferrari vs McLaren) is, to my mind, similar to what we eventually saw between Verstappen and Hamilton in 2021 (Red Bull vs Mercedes). Regardless of the outcome, that season was an epic struggle between two evenly matched drivers in pretty evenly matched cars.
In 1990, the torch passed to Senna and he basically became the F1 grid’s undisputed alpha driver. In 2021, a similar thing happened with Verstappen - and the extra self belief he must have gained from that season - not the manner in which he took the title in Abu Dhabi but the way he battled Hamilton throughout that championship - is surely a big part of what makes him so formidable now.
Watching Verstappen snipe at the superior McLarens in Melbourne reminded me of the mid-1990s, when Schumacher basically stood alone as F1’s top dog, and it took inferior drivers having the benefit of superior cars to dethrone him.
He was always there or thereabouts anyway - winning races he probably shouldn’t have, in cars that really didn’t warrant that success. Alonso’s done that, so has Hamilton. Vettel not so much. Verstappen certainly has. Norris, I think it’s fair to say, has yet to.
Verstappen didn’t win this one, but he wasn’t far off. Red Bull reckons Norris tightened up a little bit at the end of the race, and that’s why he went off briefly at Turn 6 - allowing Verstappen to pick up DRS. The fact engineer Will Joseph felt compelled to remind Norris his car was good enough to win without overdriving it, suggests McLaren too could sense Norris tensing at the sight of a familiar foe in his mirrors.
To his credit, Norris didn't crack. But he came dangerously close and will probably sense, deep down, that he’s not quite there yet, even though he's taken another big step forward under the new pressure of being the favourite and the one everyone expects to win.
We won’t ever know precisely how Norris and Verstappen stack up until/unless they become team-mates and drive completely identical cars, but I think most people would agree Norris is still working towards reaching Verstappen’s level. He could yet get there, and is definitely still improving, but Verstappen, for now, still retains that aura of superiority.
He just won’t let up. And Norris needs to maximise McLaren’s early 2025 advantage while it’s there, because if Red Bull unlocks the RB21 then Verstappen will become an even bigger problem.
Red Bull’s pre-season was a mess of confused front wing and floor experiments and lost track time. On Friday in Melbourne they still looked a bit lost and though the car came together better for qualifying, it still looks as though the front end isn’t quite responding the way Verstappen needs it to - particularly at low-speed.
Team boss Christian Horner insists the RB21 is “much calmer” than its predecessor, with none of its “nasty snaps” of oversteer, but if you overlay Norris’ pole lap against Verstappen’s third-placed effort, it does suggest Verstappen is carrying more entry speed that his car won’t always support.
And that slight lack of front end response would explain the compromised corner exits, and also the temperature spikes through the rear tyres - caused by having to hold more steering lock from not achieving the precise angle through the apex that he wanted - that led to Verstappen just bleeding lap time through the final four corners.
What we’re seeing could also be the familiar story of the new Red Bull car starting out the season as a bit of an understeerer that gradually develops into the sort of dynamic, super-responsive, dart-to-the-apex kind of car that Verstappen thrives with.
What Red Bull can’t afford is for that development to reintroduce the disconnections that neutered Verstappen for much of the middle of last season. Even then, he was still able to extend his points lead over Norris while Red Bull battled to figure out how to fix things.
Norris is undoubtedly a better driver now than he was then, but it’s equally true that Verstappen hasn’t become a worse driver. It might not take much for the RB21 to become that little bit better balanced, creating the positive snowball effect of better tyre temperature management while allowing Verstappen to drive in a way that even better exploits the car’s potential, which in turn would likely at least reduce the McLaren advantage we saw in Australia.
I feel sure the whole of McLaren, not just Norris, appreciates the full extent of the danger lurking just behind them in the world championship. McLaren deliberately made its 2025 car so ‘bold’/’innovative’/’aggressive’ to ward off the very real threat posed by Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes towards the end of 2024.
Norris is relying on that continuing to pay off because, with all due respect to him, and all other things being equal, Verstappen is still the one you’d back to win the world championship.
