AUSTIN: Days after celebrating the retention of their constructors’ world championship title, McLaren’s duelling duo of series leader Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris will be looking warily in their rear-view mirrors this weekend for Max Verstappen.
With six rounds of the world championship remaining, the top team’s title contenders are separated by just 22 points with the four-time champion adrift by 63 points, but revelling in his recent form after beating both McLarens in the last three races.
In that time, he has reduced a 104-point deficit to Piastri at the start of September by 41 points to turn a seemingly lost cause into a thrilling late, if unexpected, charge for a fifth title. If he succeeds, it will be a record for overturning a deficit.
Former champion Jacques Villneuve, who took the title in 1997, believes the Dutchman is posted to succeed and told Italian daily La Gazetta dello Sport that it will be his "best world championship…. The two McLaren drivers are suffering too much from the pressure and they need to wake up".
This weekend’s United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas is likely, therefore, to be the scene of much drama as the two McLaren men, in a car that has not been updated in recent weeks, attempting to fend off the much-revised and potent Red Bull.
That it is a ‘sprint race’ weekend, the first of three remaining this year, only adds to the potential for shredded nerves.
Verstappen has reeled off four consecutive podium finishes and has won three of the last four Austin races, only missing out last year when Ferrari claimed a one-two, contenting himself instead with a sprint race win.
For McLaren, whose imperious earlier form has declined, it is a normal race weekend with normal ‘papaya rules’ according to team boss Zak Brown. “Our strategy isn’t changing because we’ve won the constructors,” he said. “We are approaching this race in the same way as all the others.”
Norris took pole last year and finished fourth and knows he must beat his 24-year-old Australian team-mate, and Verstappen if possible, if he is to keep alive his challenge – and knows Piastri has gone three races without a podium.
Piastri’s best result in Austin was fifth last year after retiring following a crash in 2023.
The tension at McLaren is likely to be matched at Ferrari after a fraught few days of news media reports suggesting that the team is in disarray and lining up former Red Bull boss Christian Horner as a possible successor to under-pressure team chief Fred Vasseur.
Without a win this year, Ferrari and seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton, in particular, badly need a result to banish the blues – the Briton having gone 18 races without a top-three finish as he returns to a favourite circuit where he has won five times.
"We know we haven’t maximised the potential of our package in the last few races," said Vasseur, dismissing talk of internal strife. "But the team is united and fully determined to turn things around."
Mercedes will also be hunting success after George Russell’s triumph in Singapore and the belated confirmation that they are retaining an unchanged line-up, with Italian teenager Kimi Antonelli alongside Briton Russell, next year.
