Photos courtesy of McLaren Racing
When Max Verstappen first clinched the Formula 1 World Drivers’ Championship for Red Bull Racing it was on the very last lap of a tumultuous 2021 season, sparking one of the sport’s greatest ever controversies. Four years later, he’s a quadruple champion, but his incredible sequence of success looked to be at an end, as he slumped 104 points behind McLaren’s series leader Oscar Piastri after the Dutch Grand Prix at the end of August. And yet, three months later, he’s tied with Piastri for second place, and they’re both just 24 points behind McLaren’s other star driver, and championship leader, Lando Norris. And that’s less than the number of points you get for a Grand Prix win.
McLaren’s double disqualification from Saturday night’s Las Vegas Grand Prix has thrown open a previously intra-team, two-horse race into a three-way thriller. Verstappen capitalized on a first-corner error from pole-starter Norris, grabbing the lead and storming away to his sixth victory of the F1 season – and the 69th of his career – on the streets of Sin City.
But McLaren’s post-race double-DQ, for excessive skid block wear, was a hammer blow that must’ve simultaneously felt like hitting the Megabucks slot machine jackpot at the Excalibur for Verstappen. And there’s one thing you can’t give Max: An opportunity. Like that first corner slipup from Norris, Verstappen pounces on openings like a Las Vegas card shark on a wealthy tourist.
It sounds neolithic to state this but, even in 2025, the planet’s most high-tech motorsport relies on measuring a thin wooden plank, that is strapped to the floor, to ensure the legality of the cars. If any point of that Jabroc timber (which starts each race at 10mm thick) is found to be less than 9mm, and you’re thrown out. The planks of both Norris and Piastri were removed and found to have too much skid block wear towards the rear portion, which is where most downforce is produced.
The amount they contravened the rules were microscopic: Norris was 0.12 millimeters under the minimum limit – less than the thickness of a human hair – and Piastri was 0.26mm. Race stewards agreed that this was not an intentional ‘cheat’, and accepted McLaren’s argument that its cars suffered “additional and unexpected porpoising” during the race. But they disavowed its claim, however, that this was caused by accidental damage, and excluded both cars – just like it did to Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari at the Chinese Grand Prix, whose plank was found to be 0.5mm too thin.
In F1 terminology, ‘porpoising’ has nothing to do with small-toothed whales but is the state in which the car ‘bounces’ due to the powerful airflow produced by ground-effect tunnels (called ‘venturis’) under the sidepods briefly stalling – this results in the car briefly jumping up before being sucked back down again. When this happens at a certain frequency, of about 5Hz, the car effectively ‘pogos’ – you can see this from the onboard camera, as the driver’s head nods up and down. Offboard, you can see sparks fly from underneath the car, where titanium skid blocks are used to protect that precious plank. Every ground strike means that skid block is being shaved down as it sparks away, which in turn exposes the plank.
In Piastri’s case, we saw a huge shower of sparks when he engaged DRS to pass the Racing Bull of Isack Hadjar. With Norris, the late-race instructions from his engineer to slow his pace dramatically was not, after all, due to fuel consumption concerns as stated at the time, but they were coded messages given when the laptop boffins monitoring the telemetry in the back room realized that his minimum ride-height level was critical.
McLaren’s pacesetting car, that’s been the class of the 2025 F1 season and wrapped up the Constructors’ Championship in Singapore, is well known for being able to run low at the front of the floor, which is known as the ‘tea-tray section’. It is believed to achieve this via clever control of its front suspension kinematics, combined with a good understanding of its aerodynamic platform’s center of pressure.
But something went very wrong here, likely exacerbated by the wet weather conditions faced throughout practice and qualifying. Paddock rumour also suggests the team was quite marginal on plank wear following the last race in Brazil, so perhaps it just didn’t respond to that, or just got its sums wrong due to a lack of dry track time?
Speaking of math, Verstappen’s deficit to Norris, which should’ve been 42 points, is now down to 24, and Max gained another 12 on Piastri, putting him level with the former points leader, who seems to have been in freefall in recent races. In fact, Piastri’s loss of form is about as bewildering as McLaren’s double exclusion – his last podium was at Monza in September, a stark contrast his record of 13 top-three finishes from 14 starts before that!
The destiny of the title will be decided in the Middle East, beginning with this weekend’s event (which offers more points, as it’s run to the sprint format) at the Lusail International Circuit in Qatar, followed by the finale at Abu Dhabi’s Yas Marina on December 7. It was in Abu Dhabi, on that fateful final lap when he passed Hamilton to snatch his first crown, where Verstappen’s serial title success began.
Max knows what it takes to get the job done, while neither Norris nor Piastri have been in this situation before. But the big question is, after getting it so wrong in Vegas, does McLaren know how to fix things and counter Verstappen’s vicious challenge?
