April 7, 2025
The 2025 Japanese Grand Prix wasn’t a classic, but it will remembered for one of the best performances of Max Verstappen’s stellar career.
In more than 35 years watching Formula 1, I’ve seen some great races at Suzuka. This wasn’t one of them. All of the top six finished exactly where they started. Of the top 10, only Lewis Hamilton made any progress, gaining one place by overhauling the increasingly impressive Isack Hadjar to finish seventh. If you got up before 6 am UK time to turn on your television, you’d have been forgiven for going back to bed by seven.
If the Japanese Grand Prix of 2025 is remembered over the years to come, it will be thanks entirely to an outstanding performance by Max Verstappen. In a car so temperamental it appears to be almost undriveable by mere mortals, the reigning World Champion produced a minor miracle of a qualifying lap to snatch pole from McLaren’s Lando Norris at the last possible moment, before going on to convert that starting position into a victory with his trademark ruthless efficiency. It is a truth universally acknowledged that McLaren currently have the quickest car on the grid, but Verstappen didn’t so much fight off the two papaya machines as keep them comfortably at arm’s length. Hard as they chased, they could never get within striking distance of the Dutchman, who duly won a fourth successive race at one of motorsport’s great driver’s circuits.
Verstappen’s many detractors might point out that, on the evidence of the first three races of this season, it is even harder to overtake in Formula 1 in 2025 than it has been in recent years, and they would certainly have a case. However, all but the most partisan would have to concede that Verstappen produced the kind of drive only a truly great driver can deliver. He may have won four world titles in a row, but the fact he has largely done so in dominant machinery means there are still those who doubt his position in the pantheon of the sport. Race by race, he is now dispelling those doubts.
In an open formula like F1, a driver’s performance is heavily dependent on that of their car; the driver with the best machinery will usually win. One of the hallmarks of a truly great driver is their ability to win races in machinery that has no right to be fighting at the front. Ayrton Senna did it in the 1993 McLaren, taking on and beating the all-conquering Williams-Renaults. Michael Schumacher did it in his first year at Ferrari in 1996, taking three victories in a car that, initially at least, his team-mate Eddie Irvine struggled to drag into the lower reaches of the top ten. And in 2025, Max Verstappen is doing it, too.
On Saturday, he qualified his RB21 (a car so difficult to drive that Liam Lawson could qualify it no higher than eighteenth in his two attempts at the start of this season) a full second and 14 places ahead of his new team-mate, Yuki Tsunoda. The Dutchman’s fastest race lap was eight tenths of a second faster than that of the home favourite (who finished a distant twelfth) and one tenth faster than that of McLaren’s Lando Norris.
Verstappen is coaxing his wild, recalcitrant Red Bull to places it has no right to be, and has closed the gap to Norris in the driver’s championship standings to just one point, despite fighting two faster cars effectively single-handed at all of the first three Grands Prix. If he can do that in a car that is considered career-threatening for any other driver on the grid, just imagine what he might do in one that works properly.
The 2025 title battle is now officially a three-way fight.
