Max Verstappen won the Qatar Grand Prix on Sunday after a costly strategy error by McLaren hurt both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, setting up a three-way championship decider next weekend in the last Formula 1 race of the 2025 season.
Oscar Piastri finished second and fellow McLaren driver Lando Norris finished fourth after getting stuck behind a few cars following his final pit stop.
Norris continues to lead the standings with 408 points, but the gap has narrowed after Sunday. Verstappen is behind him with 396 points and Piastri slightly further behind with 392 points.
With a maximum of 25 points available in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix next weekend, all three of them stand a chance of winning. For Norris and Piastri, it would be their first championship. For Verstappen, it would be his fifth consecutive championship, a feat achieved in F1 onlyby Michael Schumacher.
“Really well done with the strategy, guys,” Verstappen said over team radio after taking the checkered flag. “We keep staying in it! That’s a very lovely race.”
It will be the first F1 title decider in a finale since 2021, when Verstappen captured his maiden world championship, and the first since 2010 when more than two drivers entered the last race with a mathematical chance of winning the trophy.
While a victory awards 25 points, second place awards 18 points and third place grants 15 points. From there the points gradually diminish through 10th place.
Piastri, who looked like the strongest driver all weekend, qualified on pole position and led away at the start. Norris qualified second but was overtaken by Verstappen in the first corner after the Red Bull driver started on the grippier side of the grid.
The race was upended on Lap 7 by a “safety car” brought out by a crash between Nico Hulkenberg and Pierre Gasly. Verstappen, along with most of the grid, came in for a cheap pit stop for fresh tires, but the two McLarens stayed out.
“Speechless,” a bitterly disappointed Piastri said over team radio after the race ended. “I don’t have any words.”
Norris said it wasn’t McLaren’s finest day or his strongest weekend, but he added that he’s still “happy” after he put himself in a position to lead the championship heading into the final race.
“We thought we did what was correct,” Norris told reporters after the race, saying he “probably wouldn’t have lost a position” without team’s strategy mistake. “I also have to have faith the team are making the right call. And that’s what I had to do.”
“I take in on the chin. We will take it on the chin,” he said. “And we’ll see what we can do next weekend.”
The race was unusual in that it required a maximum stint of 25 laps on any tire, meaning at least two pits stops for each driver in the 57-lap race, limiting strategy options.
After his second pit stop, Piastri could do nothing about Verstappen, who was far away in the distance. Carlos Sainz of Williams finished third place, just holding off Norris in the final lap to complete the podium.
“In hindsight it’s pretty obvious what we would have done, but we’ll discuss it as a team,” Piastri said in a postrace interview broadcast on F1TV and ESPN. “Obviously a little bit tough to swallow at the moment.”
The victory Sunday was the 70th of Verstappen’s career, marking a staggering comeback after he sat 104 points behind the championship lead in the middle of the season and all but wrote off his own title hopes.
“We will fight to the end, mate,” Verstappen’s race engineer, Gianpiero Lambiase, told him over the radio.
David Beckham was spotted in the McLaren garage snapping a photo of Piastri’s first pit stop on his phone.
His fight back was aided by a self-inflicted wound by McLaren, which had both of its cars disqualified last weekend in the Las Vegas Grand Prix because of illegal plank wear. Had that not occurred, Norris’ fourth place in Qatar would have been enough to clinch the world championship.
Ahead of the Qatar Grand Prix, Piastri won the “sprint” race on Saturday, while Norris finished third. The race broke a lengthy slump for Piastri, in which he had failed to finish on the podium since early September. In that time, Norris closed a 34-point deficit to Piastri and took the lead in the world championship.
Piastri led the world championship for much of the season, but he has fallen to third place heading into the final race. And it was the second weekend in a row when McLaren team bosses had to apologize to both their drivers for letting them down.
“We made the wrong decision. Terrible for Oscar and Lando. Oscar was absolutely impeccable all weekend. So we let them down,” McLaren CEO Zak Brown told F1TV after the race, saying they didn’t want to second-guess their original strategy because of the safety car. “Nothing we can do about it now. We’re leading the championship. ... So let’s do the best we can in Abu Dhabi.”
“Need to just go give Oscar and Lando big hugs, because they did their job this weekend,” Brown said.
