MAX VERSTAPPEN DOMINATES VEGAS AS LANDO CLOSES IN ON F1 TITLE FIGHT
Max Verstappen won the Las Vegas GP, but Lando Norris extended his F1 title lead with a P2 finish. Norris is now 30 points clear of teammate Oscar Piastri and can clinch his first championship in Qatar.
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Max Verstappen from Red Bull was the winner at the Las Vegas Grand Prix on Saturday, but Lando Norris from McLaren is close to winning the Formula 1 title after he came in second, increasing his lead over his teammate Oscar Piastri to 30 points.
Piastri ended up in fourth place after Kimi Antonelli from Mercedes, who was ahead of the Australian when the race ended, had five seconds added to his time for starting too early.
George Russell, who won last year's race with the bright lights and is, like Norris, starting his 150th race, took third place for Mercedes.
With two more races and one short race to go, where a total of 58 points can be earned, Norris has 408 points compared to Piastri's 378, while Verstappen, who has won four world championships, still has a chance with 366 points.
Norris finished 20.741 seconds behind, but he now has the chance to win his first title in Qatar next weekend, and McLaren has already won the constructors' title for the second year in a row.
Quite a decent gap
Verstappen said, "The car was working quite well, much better than I expected," as he was driven to the podium with Norris and Russell in a pink Cadillac convertible made of LEGO bricks, driven by actor Terry Crews as fireworks lit up the sky above the Strip.
"In the end, there was quite a decent gap."
This was Verstappen's 69th victory in his career and his sixth this season, as well as his 125th time on the podium and eighth in a row in the 150th grand prix of Red Bull's partnership with Honda.
Norris lost the lead to Verstappen at the beginning, dropping to third when he went wide at the first turn, allowing the Dutch driver and Russell to pass him.
He took back second place from Russell on the 34th of 50 laps, but then he had to save fuel until the end.
"I let Max win," he joked. "I let him go and have a good race. No, I just braked too late," he added, using a bad word on live television, which could cause trouble for the Briton with the FIA, the sport's governing body.
"It wasn't my best performance, but when someone wins by 20 seconds, it's because they did a better job and are a bit faster."
Antonelli finished fifth, with Charles Leclerc from Ferrari in sixth and Carlos Sainz from Williams in seventh. Isack Hadjar came in eighth for Racing Bulls, and Nico Hulkenberg from Sauber and Lewis Hamilton from Ferrari finished in the top 10.
Piastri fell from fifth to seventh on the first lap after hitting Liam Lawson from Racing Bulls, who dropped to last place with a badly damaged car.
Verstappen was 20 seconds ahead of the others by lap 23 and made a pit stop at the halfway point, rejoining the race in the lead after Russell and Norris had already switched to the hard tyres.
Lance Stroll from Aston Martin was knocked out by Gabriel Bortoleto from Sauber when the Brazilian rookie drove aggressively into the first turn and ran out of room, causing both of them to retire immediately.
Pierre Gasly from Alpine also spun around when the race began, and a caution period was put in place during the second lap so workers could pick up pieces of car parts between the first and fourth turns.
The caution period was used once more on lap 16 because there were more pieces of cars on the track after Alex Albon from Williams and Hamilton crashed; Hamilton had moved up from 19th and last place to 13th place on the first lap.
Albon, whose team could not talk to him in his car from the very beginning, was given a five-second time penalty for causing the crash and was also warned for not following the correct steps at the start.
THE 2026 SHIFT: CARLOS SAINZ WARNS THAT F1’S NEW 50:50 POWER SPLIT NEEDS FLEXIBILITY
A new era begins: Discover why Carlos Sainz is urging the FIA to remain open to rule changes before the 2026 Australian Grand Prix.
Williams F1 driver Carlos Sainz wants the FIA and Formula One Management to keep an open mind about the new regulations. He points out that, after some real-world running, there’s a chance they’ll need to tweak a few things.
With pre-season testing in Bahrain wrapped up, every team’s attention is on the first race in Australia, set for March 6-8. The new rules are a big deal this year; they call for a nearly 50:50 split between internal combustion and electric power, along with a pile of other changes. Sainz spoke to Motorsport.com about how tough energy harvesting could get at the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne.
“Yeah, Melbourne’s going to be tougher, no doubt,” he said in Bahrain. “But honestly, I can’t say exactly how tough, because I haven’t run the simulator with the new calibrations for Melbourne yet.”
He went on, “My message to FOM and the FIA is pretty simple: at the start of the year, let’s stay open to making changes if it turns out these new rules are a bit over the top when it comes to energy harvesting or deployment during a lap. Some tracks might be fine, maybe even Bahrain, though I’m not fully convinced based on what we’ve seen so far.
“But tracks like Melbourne or Jeddah, where energy demands are higher, we might have to rethink things a bit.
“Honestly, it’s a huge shift for everyone. Nobody really knew how much drag or downforce these new cars would have, or what kind of deployment levels teams could manage. So all I’m asking is that we stay flexible, just in case we need to fine-tune things to keep the racing exciting.
“That’s really my only point. We should stay flexible, not lock ourselves into a set approach to energy management.”
CHASING HISTORY: OSCAR PIASTRI FIGHTS TO END AUSTRALIA’S 46-YEAR WAIT FOR AN F1 TITLE
F1 news: Piastri eyes the crown. Get the report on Alan Jones’s psychological secrets and the battle within the McLaren garage.
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Alan Jones probably wondered if his record as the last Australian Formula 1 world champion was finally under threat when Oscar Piastri took the win at Zandvoort last year. Suddenly, McLaren had a star on their hands. With nine races to go, Piastri pulled 34 points clear of Lando Norris after Norris’s car broke down at the Dutch Grand Prix. Max Verstappen was still hanging back, not looking like much of a threat, at least not yet. Almost no one thought Verstappen would end up ahead of Piastri by the time they got to Abu Dhabi.
Everyone’s been talking about McLaren’s choices between their two drivers and whether Piastri struggles more on low-grip tracks on those weekends where he lost most of his points. But if you look back, Alan Jones had a totally different mindset from the drivers you see on the grid today.
For Piastri to finally close out a title, maybe he needs to steal a page from Jones’s book. When Jones took the championship in 1980, he did things his own way.
Jones once said being a “loner” was his secret in F1. In the Drivers on Drivers book, he got pretty honest about how he kept his distance from everyone else. “I used to keep everyone at arm’s length. I never went out of my way to be mates with any of them,” he said. “I was very much a loner. I don’t know if it was out of fear or giving something away; I don’t know what it was. I’d never go down and lounge around the pool with the others in South Africa, Brazil, or Argentina. I’d just stay in my room. I was self-centred. I was there to do a job, and that was it.”
He even hated staying in the same hotel as the guys he was racing. Sometimes, he’d even change flights if there were too many other drivers on his plane. He just didn’t want to reveal anything, not even a glimpse of his personality. “I wasn’t racing against them as people; I was racing against them as things, as objects,” he said. “You’d spot a black Lotus or a red Ferrari and know who was in it, but it didn’t matter. It was just an object you had to pass.”
Now, Piastri’s situation is pretty different. These days, you can’t really hide from the world if you’re an F1 driver. Even though Piastri’s not the loudest guy on the grid, he’s built a big fanbase with his dry sense of humour; people even compare him to Kimi Raikkonen. Still, the social media era means he can’t be as private as Jones was back in the day. He’s often seen travelling to races with other drivers like George Russell and Alex Albon.
Piastri admitted recently that he’s not sure exactly what he needs to do to become a world champion. Maybe Jones’s old-school advice is the key to helping him make that final step, turning him from a contender into a champion.
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