As Max Verstappen charged across the track in the season-closing Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, taking the first place in the race and second overall in the Driver’s Championship, the Dutchman personified sheer grit under pressure. At the height of the campaign, he trailed the championship leader by a staggering 104 points, a deficit that seemed impossible to overcome.
Yet what followed after the summer break was nothing short of extraordinary. Race by race, Verstappen clawed back the gap, posting multiple wins, near-flawless drives, and a string of podiums that turned heads across the paddock.
Though the final standings granted the championship to McLaren’s Lando Norris, the slender two-point margin on the points table fails to capture what 2025 truly was – an almost-unbelievable season where skill, team strategy, and pure perseverance brought Verstappen back from the edge.
The story of his resurgence, however, was far from straightforward.
Red Bull’s machinery showed cracks for the first time in years, and the four-time world champion often found himself compensating for a car that no longer granted dominance. This forced Verstappen to push the limits of both himself and his RB21 to what could have been one of the most dramatic comebacks in F1 history.
What truly shifted the trajectory of Verstappen’s season were the wild swings in circumstance around him. Some weekends, McLaren arrived with fresh aero parts that immediately lifted their pace, forcing Red Bull into a defensive posture. At others, Red Bull’s own upgrades behaved inconsistently, giving Verstappen a car that felt planted on Friday and unpredictable by Sunday.
Tyre behaviour, too, became a decisive variable - tracks with high degradation, like Barcelona and Singapore, often exposed the RB21’s weaknesses, while low-degradation circuits allowed Verstappen to mask those issues with clever tyre management.
And beyond pure performance, the season was dotted with moments where races flipped on factors no driver could control - safety-car timing that undid carefully planned strategies, late-race weather shifts that rewarded or punished a tyre choice, or technical rulings that wiped out a rival’s points overnight.
Few moments altered the title race as dramatically as the fallout from Las Vegas. What had been a strong weekend for McLaren with Norris finishing in second and Piastri in fourth, ended in catastrophe when both the drivers were disqualified after post-race scrutineering due to the planks on their MCL39s being thinner than the FIA-mandated 9mm.
The technical breach wiped out a haul of points for both the drivers as well as the team and more than that handed Verstappen a crucial advantage in his bid for a fifth world title.
A different kind of swing came at the second last race of the season in Qatar. As Kick Sauber driver Nico Hulkenberg attempted to pass Pierre Gasly around the outside at Turn 2, the pair made contact, sending Hulkenberg spinning through the gravel before he came to a stop, deploying an early safety car in the seventh lap.
Verstappen, running second at that point, elected to pit with the rest of the grid fitting fresher rubber and creating a strategic window in which drivers on new tyres could attack through the stint. However, McLaren chose not to pit either of their cars under that safety car window to maintain track position.
"We should have just followed him in, no? If we knew the car ahead was staying out," a confused Norris asked his race engineer Will Joseph, who explained, "They have lost all flexibility for the remainder of the race."
"This has worked out horribly for McLaren. Those behind have pitted and they have not," former Formula 1 driver and Sky Sports F1 commentator Martin Brundle said. He later added, "Stay tuned to this race, everybody. It feels to me as though McLaren have missed a trick!"
The consequence was immediate - Verstappen, having pitted with the pack, enjoyed better tyre life and race pace, converting the strategic opportunity into a race win.
McLaren team principal, Andrea Stella, later admitted the move to be a mistake.
The Qatar GP being a mandated two-stop race, that early stop allowed Verstappen to reset his strategy and run an aggressive middle phase, while McLaren were locked into ageing tyres and shrinking options. Many analysts called it one of the season’s pivotal strategy errors.
Heading into Abu Dhabi, the championship hung by the thinnest thread. Verstappen arrived trailing Norris by only 12 points in the championship standings, an unimaginable scenario just two months earlier. McLaren, stung by the Qatar misstep, entered the weekend determined not to falter again, while Red Bull sensed the kind of opening that only appears once a decade.
“I have nothing to lose here,” a confident Verstappen said in a pre-race interview.
Red Bull finding the edge
Behind the garage shutters, the pressure was immense. For the first time since 2020, Red Bull’s engineering group found itself split on development direction. Verstappen’s feedback grew increasingly pointed - one weekend praising balance, the next calling the car “nervous and disconnected”.
For much of the first half of 2025, Red Bull appeared to be drifting, uncertain whether to push major upgrades or stick with incremental fixes. After a disappointing showing in Bahrain, where the car suffered from tyre‑degradation and balance problems, the team publicly declined to introduce any “major” upgrades for the immediate future.
Instead, they committed only to small adjustments, underscoring internal doubts whether their development tools, such as their wind‑tunnel and simulation correlation, still reliably predicted real‑world performance.
Meanwhile the 2025 driver‑lineup shuffle, dropping Liam Lawson after only two races and bringing in Yuki Tsunoda, exposed Red Bull’s ongoing struggle to find a credible second driver. Many critics argued the rapid change looked reactionary rather than strategic, especially in a season where the team could ill‑afford instability.
But the mid‑season mark proved a turning point. Red Bull rolled out a comprehensive upgrade, a B‑spec floor, revised sidepods and suspension, and tweaks to brake cooling and aero balance, aimed at broadening the RB21’s “operating window”.
As Technical Director Pierre Wache explained, “We modified most of the stuff that is maybe not as visible as the older car. The concepts overall stay the same, but plenty of stuff has changed underneath and inside the car that, in terms of cooling, suspension, aero package… everything has changed to achieve the characteristics we like.”
With these upgrades, Verstappen regained competitiveness on tracks where previously the car’s sensitivity and tyre degradation had betrayed him, and the team’s shift from “holding pattern” tweaks to decisive engineering moves pushed it to write a comeback narrative.
Title race to remember for the ages
The 2025 season will remain unforgettable for the drama, resilience, and unpredictability that defined it. Verstappen’s late charge, amplified by Red Bull’s mid-season upgrades and strategic brilliance, transformed what seemed like a lost cause into a championship challenge that kept fans on the edge of their seats.
The defending world champion’s ability to extract performance from a car that had wavered earlier in the season spoke to his adaptability and racecraft, qualities that very few in the paddock could match.
The tension across the final races, from Las Vegas to Qatar, highlighted just how fine the margins had become. Every safety-car, tyre choice, and pit-stop decision carried the weight of championship implications. By Abu Dhabi, Verstappen had restored himself to a position where, on any given weekend, victory was possible.
The 2025 season pushed both cars and drivers to their limits, showing how skill, quick decisions, and careful preparation can turn a difficult championship into a fight for the title.
As for Verstappen, Red Bull, and the fans, it was a title race to remember for the ages, one that reaffirmed why Formula 1 remains a sport where fortunes can swing in moments, and a thrilling comeback can never be ruled out, even when the odds are stacked against it.