Despite trailing his McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri for 15 races, Lando Norris finds himself in pole position for the title going into the final weekend of the year, leading with 408 points. The Briton has been in superb form of late, overturning a deficit of 34 points to retake the championship lead after six long months.
Irrespective of where his challengers, Australia’s Piastri and Dutchman Max Verstappen finish on Sunday, the 26-year-old will be champion if he takes the podium at the Yas Marina Circuit. But it isn’t going to be that easy as seen in Qatar where Norris failed to overtake slower cars to end fourth, yielding more points to Verstappen and Piastri, who finished first and second respectively.
At the end of the Dutch GP in August, Red Bull’s Verstappen had given up on a fifth successive driver’s title, being 104 points behind then championship leader Piastri.
But with nothing to lose, the perennially hungry four-time champion delivered a sensational second half of the year, finishing the last nine races on the podium, winning five, doing the improbable to be second and only 12 points behind Norris.
“He’s like that guy in a horror movie, that right as you think he’s not coming back, he’s back!” McLaren CEO Zak Brown told a podcast, to which Verstappen jokingly responded: “He can call me Chucky”, referring to American movie franchise Child’s Play and its death-defying character.
In April, former race winner Jean Alesi had predicted to this daily that Verstappen could steal the championship as the two McLaren drivers continue to duel between themselves. That is exactly how it has unfolded.
Unlike other teams, McLaren have a history of maintaining parity between the two drivers at the cost of wins and even championships, the prime example being 2007. Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso were first and second going into the season-ending Brazilian GP. As they squabbled with each other, outsider Kimi Raikkonen came out of nowhere to emerge world champion by one point.
Verstappen’s comeback campaign has also been helped by McLaren’s errors. In Las Vegas, Norris and Piastri finished second and fourth but were later disqualified, losing all their points, for excessive plank wear — something McLaren should have managed better.
At the Lusail International Circuit, despite locking out the front row, wrong pit stop calls by McLaren cost Piastri a victory while Norris failed to even finish on the podium.
“It wasn’t the correct decision,” McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said. “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.”
Piastri, who led the championship for the longest time this season, has come out as the biggest loser, not necessarily due to his fault but as things stand, he will go into Abu Dhabi trailing Norris by 16 points.
The Australian looked to have found his old rhythm that had gone missing in Qatar as he was by far the fastest driver throughout the weekend, topping the only free practice, taking pole in sprint qualifying and comfortably winning Saturday’s sprint race.
Piastri continued his run to take pole and looked on course for victory before McLaren’s poor pit call following the safety car saw him slip from second to third in the championship.
But it isn’t over till the chequered flag is waved at the end of the 58-lap race on Sunday. Piastri can take heart from the fact that the last two times three drivers went into the final race as contenders, the third-placed driver won the championship — Sebastian Vettel in 2010 and Raikkonen in 2007.
