Last Updated on May 4 2025, 12:23 pm
Max Verstappen claimed his third Grand Prix pole position of the 2025 season, not bad for a driver who has been given the least competitive car produced by Red Bull in over half a decade. Then again could it be that the Milton Keynes based squad are sandbagging?
Speaking after another Verstappen pole position, a visibly disappointed Andreas Stella went on to claim that he believes the RB21 is a better car than most people believe. Max is the first driver to rack up three GP pole positions this year, pipping Lando Norris in Japan and Miami and Oscar Piastri in Jeddah.
McLaren’s ‘cool’ Aussie driver leads the world championship from his team mate by nine points, but Verstappen lurks not far behind despite a disappointing Sprint race result which saw him handed a time penalty and with the mini race finishing behind the safety car, Verstappen’s fourth on the road quickly became seventeenth when the ten second time penalty was applied.
McLaren drivers make mistakes
Come the qualifying hour and the Sprint was long forgotten as Verstappen sniffed an opportunity as the McLaren drivers kept on making mistakes. Oscar Piastri the darling of the paddock since his win in Jeddah set his fastest lap of the entire session on his first run in quali 2.
“There’s definitely still some things with our car that we want to try and address, and driving it right on the limit is one of them,” Piastri revealed after the session ended. “This weekend it has had enough pace to be on pole, it’s just that I’ve not done as good a job as I should have, unfortunately.”
The McLaren driver bemoaned the timing of the safety car in the Sprint, which for a second year in a row in Miami handed the advantage to team mate Lando Norris. He was forced to pit later than Piastri given the Aussie was leading the race and offered the first choice over the timing of his tyre change by the team.
However, small details reveal both McLaren drivers are operating at a level below the world champion given for each of them their theoretical perfect lap in qualifying was quicker than the time posted by Max for pole position. Both Norris and Piastri’s quickest sectors added together would have seen them comfortably ahead of the Red Bull driver, yet it was Verstappen who put it all together.
Verstappen is making the difference
65 milli seconds was the difference between Verstappen and Norris, who evidently made a mistake in the final corner, which cost him just over a tenth of a second. Piastri was just under two tenths off pole, but had Russell behind him in fifth another 10 milli seconds further back.
McLaren team principal, Andreas Stella breathed in and out deeply when asked by Sky F1’s pit lane reporter how had McLaren not fulfilled the expectation of having both cars starting from the front row. “Red Bull, they are very good at making fast cars, they are very exceptionally good I would say at driving fast cars and they are extremely good also in creating the narrative to their advantage,” Stella opened.
“They exploit every possible opportunity to stay in the competition and some of these opportunities sometimes is to create the narrative like: ‘oh we are making miracles here, the others should win every single practice session and qualifying and race’,” suggested the McLaren boss.
Having noted the legendary football manager, Alex Ferguson’s type “siege mentality”, Stella claims that his team see this happening but “turn the page quickly” to concentrate on their own path to progress. Yet the Italian appears to be attempting to form his own narrative, which seeks to manage the paddock expectations that the McLaren cars are the one’s to beat each weekend.
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More Red Bull chaos in the pit lane
However, Red Bull and Max in particular are not cruising this year and the data supports this view. Verstappen took pole position in Japan, Bahrain and in Miami in 2024 and the reduced margins this year show how on a knife edge the competition now really is. Max’s pole position in Miami last season was over 3/10ths faster than that of Charles Leclerc in second. This year it was 65 hundredths. In Bahrain the gap to the Ferrari driver again was over 2/10ths of a second, this year just 10/100ths. And in Saudi Max had his slimmest margin of the year so far, beating Oscar Piastri to pole by just 0.012 seconds when in 2024 the gap was positively comfortable at 0.14 seconds.
There is no way Red Bull of any team on the grid can engineer such close results and the cars with their onboard cameras offer scrutiny post track sessions to analysts who explain where a driver made up or lost time.
Red Bull are clinging on in the drivers title race with max Verstappen, but he suffered badly in the Miami Sprint after another pit stop operation went badly wrong. Max was given the green light to leave his box, but the traffic lights crew member who decides whether its safe to release the car made a “human error” as Horner explained later.
A Verstappen win in Miami blows title race wide open
Car number 1 almost had a full on collision with Kimi Antonelli as both swerved to avoid hitting each other, with the Red Bull losing its front wing’s left endplate. With the McLaren’s finishing 1-2 in the Sprint, Verstappen is now ten points behind Norris and nineteen behind championship leader Piastri. Yet the weighting in the points for winning a Grand Prix would mean should Max finish where he starts and both McLaren drivers do the same, The deficit to Piastri will be just six points and whilst he will be level with Lando, having two race wins would see the Red Bull driver classified ahead.
It appears the Formula One gods shine on Lando Norris in Miami, but given the lack of overtaking opportunities at the temporary circuit in Florida, he made need another stroke of luck to out race the world champion.
McLaren have the quickest car in the field, but Red Bull have the best driver F1 has seen for decades, and it is his quest for a record equalling fifth consecutive title – something Lewis Hamilton never achieved – is driving him on to extract every last gasp of performance out of his RB21. Red Bull are however developing their RB21 quietly, Max had a new floor this weekend which improved his levels of downforce and as the F1 team most renown for being the Kings of in season F1 car progress move closer, McLaren are displaying the first signs of concern.
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Hamilton hist out: “Confusing” Ferrari
Hamilton frustration over radio confusion at Miami Grand Prix as Ferrari transition continues – Lewis Hamilton’s latest appearance at the Miami Grand Prix Sprint once again highlighted the ongoing transition period he’s experiencing at Ferrari, as the seven-time Formula One World Champion continues to find his feet in a team still learning how to get the best out of his unique racing style. Qualifying seventh for the sprint event under the Florida lights was not a disastrous result for Hamilton, but it was another signpost in what is becoming a slow-burning saga of expectation versus reality for one of the most successful drivers in the sport’s history.
Despite an improved performance compared to his struggles earlier in the season – notably at Jeddah – Hamilton was publicly unimpressed by a particular radio communication during Friday’s sprint qualifying session. It exposed cracks in a still-evolving relationship with his Ferrari race engineer Riccardo Adami, whose style of communication seems a far cry from the intuitive and finely honed exchanges Hamilton once shared with Mercedes stalwart Peter Bonnington.
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