‘Turns sour’: F1’s new title reality explained — and ugly ‘domino effect’ McLaren must avoid
This weekend’s Canadian Grand Prix heralds a new start for the 2025 Formula 1 championship.
It’s not because of any rule change, and it’s not because Montreal represents any particular marker in the calendar as round 10 of the season.
It’s because at the previous round, the Spanish Grand Prix, the sport understood that McLaren isn’t about to be easily caught.
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The much-hyped change to rules around flexible front wings had no discernible effect on the competitive order despite some teams thinking — or perhaps simply hoping — that it would drag McLaren back into the pack.
In fact on single-lap pace McLaren was even further up the road than usual. Oscar Piastri’s pole margin was the biggest of the season, and the gap between McLaren and the next-quickest Saturday team was the biggest since the season opener in Melbourne.
In race trim Max Verstappen was a stern challenger and looked closer to the level of competitiveness expected before the weekend, but he was using a three-stop strategy that enabled him to push harder for longer, whereas the Piastri and Lando Norris had some tyre-saving margin built in.
It should’ve been at least good enough for third, keeping the Dutchman just about within striking distance of the championship lead, but his bizarre blow-up with George Russell after a badly timed safety car dropped him to 10th after serving a penalty. He’s now 49 points behind Piastri on the title table — as good as two clear race victories.
With a car that’s on average 0.25 seconds off the pace in qualifying and that’s looked genuinely quicker than the McLaren just once all season, it’s difficult to see how the Dutchman claws his way back into the mix.
Even those looking to McLaren’s 2024 turnaround as a source of hope must concede Woking had already begun clawing back points by this stage of the season and that its title deficit never got larger than 115 points. This year its advantage is already nearly 200 points, and no other team has shown any kind of genuine forward momentum.
Spain has had the effect of boiling down the title fight to just two drivers: Piastri and Norris separated by just 10 points at the top of the standings.
It sets up Canada as the first of a 15-round new reality: an all-McLaren showdown for the championship and a fight among the others to be best of the rest.
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McLAREN TARGETS 27-YEAR FIRST
For McLaren the challenge now is clear: chart the most effective course to its first double championship since 1998.
That’s particularly difficult given Verstappen, while likely out of title contention, isn’t about to fade away form the front of the field.
The Dutchman will be a constant thorn in the sides of Piastri and especially Norris. On paper his car could be competitive enough to contend for victories at races in Austria, Britain, Hungary, the Netherlands, Brazil and Qatar — though that forecast IS tempered by the fact Spain should have been on that list and yet he never looked like a top-step threat there.
It heightens the focus on McLaren’s management of its driver line-up. This isn’t quite a straight fight in the way Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg split the spoils of 2014–16 between themselves; external variables will regularly interfere.
We’ve already seen the team’s approach manifested on track this year, in particular in Imola, where it gave up a shot at potentially challenging Verstappen for victory by instead allowing Piastri to defend second place from Norris despite having older tyres. Norris eventually made the pass, but by then it was too late to pursue the lead.
But it preserved the integrity of the title fight between the two, and that the approach team principal Andrea Stella intends to take for the rest of the season.
“Managing Formula 1 drivers that compete for the same team on a fast car and in a quest for the championship is always going to be a difficult matter,” he said in Spain. “But so far we have approached it in a way that I think has allowed both drivers to express their qualities, their speed, and it’s been a relatively good run so far.”
The trick, he says, is to foster maximum openness inside the team.
“We always tell our drivers, ‘Don’t leave anything in the back of your mind. Anything, throw it out. Say what you think’,” he explained.
That philosophy explains Piastri’s “cheeky” radio message in qualifying in Barcelona after Norris beat him to provisional pole at the beginning of Q3 by getting a slipstream from him out of the final corner.
“In this case, Oscar’s comment was to highlight a situation that we didn’t discuss before,” Stella continued. “In itself it’s not anything too controversial, but we did not discuss that before and we don’t want to surprise our drivers with situations that we didn’t discuss before.
“We have to do some more homework and be ready even more for the coming races, which surely will be interesting.”
That open philosophy is allied to racing rules that most teams will employ: race hard but leave room and avoid crashing.
“I can only be very grateful to Lando and Oscar who have approached this internal competition with a great sense of responsibility and by pretty much sticking to the letter to what are our racing principles and approach,” Stella lauded.
Contact, however, will be inevitable. CEO Zak Brown has admitted as much. But the team isn’t anticipating a blow-up between its drivers; instead McLaren believes it will be a simple error in the heat of battle — a lockup or some other misjudgment — that could cost one or both points or, worse, put one or both out of the race.
The team is lucky that it has two drivers who so far present as apolitical and predisposed to harmony rather than chaos, but the threat of McLaren pulling rank exists as a failsafe all the same.
“Everyone’s seen plenty of championships as teammates turn sour and go in the wrong direction, and that normally leads to many things, like a domino effect of things starting to fail,” Norris told the BBC. “And that’s what we don’t want.
“We know we still want to race. We’re free to race against each other as individuals, but we also know our sole purpose is to race for McLaren, the team, the name we race under. And that’s something we’re both very proud of doing.”
BATTLE FOR BEST OF THE REST
Spain did more than clarify McLaren’s title advantage. It also catapulted Ferrari into second place on the constructors championship table.
The Italian team appears to have got there almost by stealth given it’s looked down and out for so much of this season, miles away from the top step of the podium and even having suffered a rare double disqualification in China.
But it’s done it by virtue of the fact it has the best balanced driver line-up of the remaining frontrunners, even with Hamilton’s high-profile struggles to adapt to his first Ferrari car.
George Russell is partnered with rookie Andrea Kimi Antonelli and has more than doubled the Italian’s score over nine rounds.
Red Bull Racing is effectively a one-car operation, with Verstappen having scored 137 of the team’s 144 points.
Leclerc and Hamilton are relatively closely matched 94-71 on points, a 57-43 split in terms of percentage of the team’s total tally.
Constructors championship, frontrunners
1. McLaren: 362 points
2. Ferrari: 165 points
3. Mercedes: 159 points
4. Red Bull Racing: 144 points
“I prefer to be second than fourth or fifth,” Ferrari boss Frédéric Vasseur said. “We were 50 or 60 points behind Mercedes and Red Bull after China when we were disqualified, and now we are in front of them.
“I think that over the last four or five events we did a decent job. But we also have to keep in mind that we are [here] because we want to win races; we don’t want to be P2.”
“I’m not speaking about the championship, but I’m speaking about pace.”
Just 21 points separate second from fourth — practically nothing in constructors terms — but it’s an interesting reversal of the teams’ ranking in terms of pure pace, with Ferrari slowest and Red Bull Racing fastest of those teams following McLaren.
Average gap to pole, frontrunners
1. McLaren: 0.010 seconds
2. Red Bull Racing: 0.244 seconds
3. Mercedes: 0.356 seconds
4. Ferrari: 0.443 seconds
The chasing three are split by just 0.199 seconds — enough that a good or bad weekend for any one of them can switch the order.
But unlike previous seasons, at some point even this order will become locked in, and the chopping and changing will stop.
The upgrade game, normally at this stage heading towards its peak, is already winding down as the all-new rules of 2026 rush over the horizon.
With McLaren and its drivers already so far ahead on both title tables, there’s limited logic in continuing to invest in this year’s car when next year the slate will be wiped clean.
When that happens, however, is unclear, with all three teams reserving at least one final role of the dice.
Ferrari will be perhaps the last team with a major upgrade package, which could arrive as soon as this weekend. The Italian team has designed a new floor and rear suspension set-up in a bid to get its car back into the sweet spot it enjoyed up to the Chinese Grand Prix, where Hamilton was disqualified for plank wear because his car was running too low.
Running with a higher ride height ever since has seen the team take a step backwards in competitiveness. If the updates work, we could see Ferrari consolidate its points lead by regaining ground in terms of pure points.
And Vasseur said it was important to allow at least a trickle of development for 2025 to continue deeper into the season to boost morale and keep the team operating at a higher level.
“It would be a mistake [to stop],” he said in Miami. “I think that if you want to improve, you need to stay competitors and you need to stay into the fight.
“It’s only when you are fighting for something that you pay attention to details, that you are in this kind of mindset of competition.
“I can’t imagine that a group of 1000 people can keep the same motivation if you give up something, because you don’t have the pressure of the result for next week or you don’t have the pressure of the result for the next session.”
Red Bull Racing has also been tempted to continue development on its 2025 car, with the team yet to shift the majority of its focus to 2026.
“I think we are 30-70,” technical director Pierre Waché told RacingNews365. “70 in favour of now [the 2025 car].”
Waché contended that work undertaken this year wasn’t totally wasted depending on exactly what it is.
“There’s plenty of stuff that you learn from this year that you could apply for next year,” he said.
“Not the baseline of the car — it will be completely different — but everything you learn you take it for the future, such as characteristic-wise, balance-wise, limitations.”
Mercedes, meanwhile, has given little away on its development plans beyond suggesting that it will bring upgrades to several more races this season following its first major package in Imola late last month.
But no matter how much each team is keeping in reserve, it’s unlikely to be enough to catch and pass McLaren.
“We are still definitely keeping interest and momentum on this year’s car,” Stella said. “We are not taking anything for granted.
“We need to improve the car, especially in some conditions, and we are planning to do so with some upgrades.”
“At the moment we’ve been trying to use the resources we have in the most logical and efficient way. At some stage we will shift our focus entirely to 2026, but definitely, even if the championships are in a good position, we have not given up attention on this year’s car.”
After nine rounds, McLaren’s supremacy is assured. It has the fastest car, the mostly evenly matched competitive line-up and a head start on development.
While Piastri and Norris vie for the championship, from this weekend everyone else is competing to be best of the rest.