Qatar GP: Max Verstappen wins in major title twist to set up F1 2025 championship decider with Lando Norris, Oscar Piastri | F1 News

Formula 1’s 2025 title fight will be settled by a thrilling three-way decider in Abu Dhabi after Max Verstappen beat Oscar Piastri to victory in the Qatar Grand Prix and championship leader Lando Norris finished only fourth.

The battle for victory on Sunday dramatically turned on the appearance of the Safety Car on lap seven after a collision over ninth place between Nico Hulkenberg and Pierre Gasly.

McLaren team-mates Piastri and Norris, running first and third at the time, did not immediately pit whereas second-placed Verstappen did – with the Red Bull driver followed in for fresh tyres by all-but one car behind him.

With the race stints at this event being limited to a maximum of 25 laps due to tyre concerns on the high-speed track – meaning a two-stop strategy was effectively locked in for the 57-lap race – McLaren’s decision to stay out meant their drivers still needed to make two visits to the pits whereas Verstappen, who was right behind them in the Safety Car queue, only needed to stop once more.

McLaren’s strategy relied on their car proving sufficiently faster than Verstappen’s Red Bull, or benefitting from a second later Safety Car later on, to overhaul him but neither scenario materialised – much to their title-chasing drivers’ cost.

Piastri finished second but Norris – who would have clinched his maiden title with a round to spare with a victory – was only fourth. Norris had been fifth starting the penultimate lap but gained an extra place, and a potentially-crucial additional two points, after an error from Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli saw him slip through to fourth.

Piastri was left particularly frustrated after the race, having seen a likely victory slip away through McLaren’s lap-seven strategy call.

“Speechless,” said the Australian. “I don’t have any words.”

Piastri’s anger was compounded by the fact that Verstappen is now Norris’ nearest challenger in the standings heading into the season-ending Abu Dhabi GP, live on Sky Sports F1 next Sunday.

Verstappen, still unfathomably in the hunt for a fifth successive title having seemingly been well out of the running at the summer break, is now just 12 points back on Norris with Piastri 16 points behind his team-mate.

Norris remains favourite to clinch the crown but his room for error has considerably narrowed. He must finish on the Abu Dhabi podium to be sure of the championship if Verstappen wins the race.

With McLaren’s strategy call proving very costly, Carlos Sainz also cashed in to take his second podium appearance of the year for Williams. The Spaniard finished just under a second ahead of Norris.

Antonelli’s late slip dropped him to fifth ahead of Mercedes team-mate George Russell, who lost ground at the start. Russell was promoted late on when Isack Hadjar’s Racing Bulls suffered a puncture while running sixth.

Fernando Alonso was seventh for Aston Martin after a late spin although he still beat the lead Ferrari of Charles Leclerc, with the Italian team’s sobering weekend delivering just four points in total.

Racing Bulls’ Liam Lawson in ninth and Red Bull’s Yuki Tsunoda in 10th rounded out the points places.

Lewis Hamilton’s forgettable Sprint weekend, which twice saw him qualify 18th, finished outside the points in 12th place as Ferrari’s fourth-place finish in the Constructors’ Championship was confirmed.

Why did McLaren not pit their drivers?

Most focus ahead of the race had been on the start and the role that Verstappen, starting on the clean side of the grid in third, would play on the run to the first corner in a race he needed to finish ahead of Norris to keep his title comeback alive into the final round.

Verstappen did make a strong start and overtook Norris for second, although Piastri stayed ahead of both thanks to a textbook getaway from pole and looked set to control a race in which overtaking was expected to be very difficult.

However, it was ultimately the implications of the special tyre rule introduced by Pirelli for the Qatar weekend, announced several weeks ago, that had the bigger effect on the race’s outcome than the battle to Turn One.

With teams able to complete no more than 25 laps on one set of tyres all weekend, one permutation for the 57-lap race was that any Safety Car on lap seven would allow drivers to pit and then complete two identical 25-lap stints to the end.

Remarkably, that is exactly how it played out – for the majority of the field – when the tangle between Gasly and Hulkenberg at Turn One saw the latter’s damaged car stranded in the run-off area and the Safety Car called.

But it was McLaren’s decision not to pit their two cars at the end of that lap which proved so damaging for their race and transformative for Verstappen’s.

After the race resumed on lap 11, Piastri continued on until lap 24, with Norris pitting for the first time at the 25-lap cut-off a lap later. A DRS train which had formed behind Alonso allowed them to rejoin fourth and fifth but more than 18 seconds behind Verstappen, who made his second stop seven laps later.

When Piastri brought forward his second stop to lap 42 in a bid to have sufficient tyre life to try and chase down the Red Bull, he rejoined with a gap of 17 seconds to make up. However, despite his tyre advantage, he only made up 10 seconds of that over the final 15 laps.

Speaking afterwards, McLaren team principal Andrea Stella told Sky Sports F1: “It was a decision not to pit. In fairness, we didn’t expect everyone else to pit.

“Once everyone pitted, it makes that the right thing to do. When you have the lead car, you don’t know what the others are going to do.”

McLaren would potentially have had to ‘double stack’ their drivers had they pitted with everyone else on lap seven, potentially meaning Norris as the second car had to be held in the box after his stop as other cars steamed in down the pit road, but Stella said: “There could have been a loss for Lando if we pitted both cars with the double stack, but, effectively, the main reason was not expecting everyone else to pit.

“It was a decision. As a matter of fact it wasn’t the correct decision.”

Piastri appeared crestfallen afterwards on a weekend he had largely dominated on an impressive return to form after a series of poor outings that had seen Norris usurp him at the top of the championship.

“I haven’t spoken to anyone but I feel pretty c**p as you can imagine. I don’t know what to say,” he said.

“We didn’t get it right with the strategy. The pace was very strong. I didn’t put a foot wrong. Just a shame.

“I left it [whether to pit] in the team’s hands to decide what the best strategy was. They had more information than I do. But, yeah…”

Verstappen ‘all under control’ as mighty title comeback goes to Abu Dhabi

McLaren’s miscue proved an unexpected gift for Verstappen.

His second win in as many weeks, and fifth in the last eight events, means that at just 12 points back on Norris heading to Abu Dhabi he is as close to the championship summit as he has been since the season’s fifth round in April.

He had been 104 points off the lead at the end of August.

“I didn’t expect to win today, that’s for sure,” admitted Verstappen.

“Looking at pure pace, we were not on the same level as McLaren, but we made the right call, as most of the grid did, in boxing under the safety car.

“That almost gives you a free pit stop and that made the race for me.

“I knew after that pit stop it was going to be two long stints on the tyre in terms of tyre wear, but we managed that very well and they didn’t really catch up too much. It was all under control.”

The 2025 F1 season concludes with the title-deciding Abu Dhabi Grand Prix live on Sky Sports F1 from Friday. Stream Sky Sports with NOW – no contract, cancel anytime