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

If he had not made such a decisive return to the championship, it would have been Verstappen who would have been the center of attention after Brazil. Even under these conditions, the Dutchman delivered a brilliant performance with one of the performances of his career.

A year ago at this race, Verstappen put himself on the brink of a fourth world championship with a brilliant comeback to win from 17th on the grid.

It was one of the best drives of all time, but it was at a time when such things were more possible in the wet.

In the dry race on Sunday, Verstappen finished third, starting from the pitlane. Just above the gearbox of Antonelli’s Mercedes, the car is in second place.

And he did this despite a puncture on lap six, which forced him to make an early pit stop and caused him to fall backwards from 13th place, from which he had recovered by then.

“Incredible” was the word Verstappen used to describe him. “He did a great job,” Antonelli said. “Sensational,” added Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies.

What is even more striking is that Red Bull was off the pace all weekend. Verstappen finished the sprint in fourth place, complaining about a lack of grip. He would have been fifth if not for Piastri’s accident.

In the Grand Prix, Verstappen finished only 16th and was eliminated in the first part of qualifying for the first time in his career.

Realizing that the changes they had made to the car for qualifying were going in the wrong direction, Red Bull chose to change the race setup. They stuck to the decision to abandon the new floor introduced in Mexico, but made a number of other tweaks, including fitting a new engine.

This breaks the rules that say teams cannot change the car’s setup once qualifying has started; hence the pit lane begins.

In a way, it did him a favor and allowed him to move off the hard tire and into his preferred intermediate, although a puncture left him behind again after completing six places in the three race laps possible up to that point between a real safety car and a virtual safety car.

Once the race started properly he began to find his way through the field, so much so that when Norris made his final stop on lap 54 with 17 to go, it was Verstappen who took over the lead.

“Not bad,” he said on the radio when his engineer Gianpiero Lambiase informed him about it.

It seemed he could have stayed out and tried to maintain the lead, and in fact some rival engineers believed he should have done so. It was even possible that Red Bull could have won if they had made two early laps on the mid-track from the first pit stop and Verstappen had managed his tires accordingly.

However, Mekies disagreed and said: “If you just look at it I don’t think there is any way we can get P1.”

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella did the same: “The level of degradation was very high and I think at one point the tires ran out of rubber,” he said.

“I think they knew it would be quite a gamble to go all the way with the same kit at Red Bull, and considering the fact that they had a new soft material to wear, I think it was the right thing to do.”