The 2025 Japanese Grand Prix will not live long in the annals of history as a thriller, but it is undeniably a race with consequence for the 2025 season.
Prospects of a McLaren whitewash? Gone.
Max Verstappen out of title contention? Nonsense.
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At a race run at a fast pace around a challenging, testing circuit, just 2.1 seconds separated the top three, and only 1.4 seconds split Red Bull Racing from the highest placed McLaren.
It bodes very well for the championship battle, even if we’re only three rounds into the campaign.
The race also gave us one big question that could similarly define the next phase of the season.
Is McLaren really on top of its approach to having two drivers in title contention?
Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were incredibly evenly matched all weekend. Norris was quickest by just 0.032 seconds in qualifying, and though the Briton took the flag by 0.7 seconds in the race, there’s a strong argument to be made that Piastri was the quicker driver.
The Australian spent most of the second stint in Norris’s wheel tracks, making it clear to the team — and to his teammate — that he was faster through that phase of the race.
In fact for almost the entire stint he was closer to Norris than Norris was to Verstappen.
Passing is extremely difficult around Suzuka. Piastri was within 0.5 seconds of Norris at times and still wasn’t able to try a move.
But the entire stint begged the question: should McLaren have swapped its drivers to target Verstappen?
Did it leave a victory on the table?
Piastri breaks down third place in Japan | 01:50
PAPAYA RUSE?
Piastri was in no doubt about what he wanted.
“I think I have the pace to get Max,” he radioed his team on lap 42, having closed to within less than a second of his teammate some laps earlier.
In other words, if Norris couldn’t get closer to Verstappen, then he should be allowed through to have a crack himself.
It’s a strategy deployed plenty of times over the years because it’s a relatively inoffensive team order. If the leading driver can’t move forwards, the following driver gets a certain number of laps to try. If they succeed, good for them. If they fail, the positions are swapped back before the end of the race.
McLaren, however, opted against it despite Piastri’s engineer appearing to confirm that Norris was pushing as hard as he could.
It looked like an obvious missed opportunity, and with victory on the line, it was one with potentially significant consequences.
But speaking to media in Suzuka after the race, team principal Andrea Stella said he didn’t see it quite so obviously.
“I don’t think it is so clear that Oscar was faster,” he said. “I think Lando was trying to get in Max’s slipstream, even closer, but anytime you went to below one second, then there was a significant loss of grip.
“Lando was doing a little bit of an elastic today, trying to cool down his tyres a bit and then going again.
“I don’t think it is a situation that we should judge at face value in terms of what the pace of the car was. Lando was trying to get close to Verstappen with maximum momentum, but it was difficult.”
Of course Piastri didn’t appear to have the same problem staying so close to Norris.
But Verstappen is the additional variable in this, and it’s true to say that every time Norris strung together some personal-best sectors to try to apply some pressure, Verstappen appeared to have no real trouble inching open the gap.
Perhaps looking at those factors — the uncertainty around Piastri’s advantage and Verstappen’s true pace — was enough to deter McLaren from making what could have been a controversial call that could have led to some embarrassing radio messages.
“At the end I said what I felt,” Piastri said. “Clearly the team were happy with the way things were. If I were in Lando’s position, I would also be pretty happy with the way things were. That’s fine.
“I just said what I felt in the car. That’s how we want to go racing.”
To his credit, Piastri shouldered the blame for ultimately putting himself in the situation.
“Yesterday was the day that dictated your weekend a lot, and I didn’t get the most out of the car,” he said. “That unfortunately dictated a lot of what I could do today.
“That’s led to the result I’ve got.”
McLaren mounts some strong arguments in its defence. But without having at least tried for the victory with Piastri ahead of Norris, it’s left it as a substantial unknown.
Drivers’ funny reaction to ‘highlights’ | 01:40
BUT PIASTRI BENEFITED FROM A DIFFERENT STRATEGY CALL
Turning down a chance to be proactive late in the race was defining of McLaren’s approach to the entire grand prix, the team playing its hand defensively from the very first lap.
Once Verstappen beat Norris off the line and the top three completed the first lap in grid order, the die was cast.
Rather than concocting an ambitious strategy to try to move forward, McLaren kept its eyes on its rear-view mirror.
Piastri passively benefited from this approach.
It became clear early in the race that tyre degradation was low, and so teams were daring each other to be the first to pit rather than stopping based on pace.
George Russell was the first among the frontrunners to change tyres, coming in on lap 19 to shake the tree.
Rather than giving Norris, the lead McLaren, pit priority, Piastri was brought in to cover the Mercedes driver on lap 20.
It was abundantly, even excessively, cautious. Russell was 4.6 seconds behind Piastri when he stopped. When Piastri stopped on the following lap, he rejoined the race with a similar margin and with three cars back to the Mercedes.
But it cost Norris a strategic shot at victory.
Norris was around 1.4 seconds behind Verstappen when Piastri pitted, a far more realistic undercut range.
Lap 20 would have been the ideal moment to bring Norris in. Instead he was forced to wait one more lap.
That gave Red Bull Racing a chance to pre-empt the stop.
Verstappen came in on lap 21. McLaren decided to let Norris follow him in.
Pitting on the same lap as a rival is almost always a dud strategy in normal conditions, guaranteeing only that roughly the same margin is retained.
To be fair to McLaren, a faster stop than Red Bull Racing almost got Norris ahead, but this couldn’t have been expected before making the call, and in any case the difference wasn’t quite enough to get the Briton ahead.
So in effect Piastri’s third place was prioritised over Norris’s potential to win the race.
But Stella revealed afterwards that undercutting Verstappen was being considered as too risky anyway, particularly with the field remaining so bunched up.
“By giving up track position you also expose the car that you pit to safety car risk,” he said. “Lando would have lost positions in a safety car should a safety car be deployed.
“In hindsight you don’t see any safety car … but an undercut attempt comes with some risks.
“It was apparent that the degradation was low, so if you lose position with a safety car, it’s lost. I don’t think we could have overtaken a Ferrari or a Mercedes today.”
The low degradation was also the reason giving Norris an overcut wasn’t considered.
“He would have lost positions to some other cars, including Oscar,” Stella said.
So the team played a defensive strategy to guarantee it retained second and third but without trying to win the race.
It says two things.
One is that the team is determined to play an even hand. You could criticise its lack of intervention one way or the other, but on balance both drivers ended up with slightly imperfect Sundays.
The other is that McLaren is still clearly prioritising the constructors championship. Team points mattered more than drivers points today.
It’ll be interesting to see how long it feels wedded to that approach.
It also suggests McLaren is confident it can keep ahead of the pack — it’s several times this weekend said it believes it has the fastest car — meaning the odd lost victory is unlikely to count for much in the grand scheme of either title.
But there’s one final point to consider, courtesy of antagonist Christian Horner, the Red Bull Racing boss.
“The problem they have is they have two drivers that are fighting for the drivers championship,” he said of McLaren’s passivity. “The difficulty they have is that they’ve made a bed where they’re going to let them race.
“That’s the compromise that inevitably comes with that.”
It’s a little gibe at reigning constructors champion, but you better believe that Horner sees his effectively one-car team as an opportunity to pinch the drivers title, even if the constructors championship might end up being out of reach.
Norris nearly eats dirt after pit drama | 01:31
VERSTAPPEN PROVES HE CAN’T BE DISCOUNTED IN THE TITLE FIGHT
There was a sense of familiarity — maybe PTSD for some — when the Dutch and Austrian national anthems rung out over the Suzuka grandstands.
Memories of Verstappen domination are still fresh, even as the sport moves into a new era of McLaren leadership.
But this is not peak Red Bull Racing. It is, however, peak Verstappen.
From his qualifying lap on Saturday to his comprehensive performance on Sunday, this was Verstappen in the form of his life. He’s the defending four-time world champion, and he’s clearly in no mood to let the qualities of his car dictate his title hopes.
“An incredible race for Max and great for the team,” Horner told media in Suzuka after the race.
“We know the McLarens are very, very fast and it needed Max to be inch perfect with two very fast McLarens right behind him.
“For 53 laps he made not a single mistake and had the pace to cover them, to keep them out of his DRS.
“He was particularly strong in turn 11 and the last corner to keep that vital one-second gap and had enough to cover whatever they could throw at us today.”
Horner has never needed to be asked twice to boost his star driver, but this weekend in Japan there was a sense that something special, something important, had been witnessed from the best of a generation.
“I think that’s one of Max’s best weekends that he’s had,” Horner said.
His qualifying performance was particularly noteworthy, pinching pole from Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri in clearly quicker cars.
“It was in a car that the theoreticals were behind McLaren’s lap,” Horner said. “Max extracted every ounce of performance. McLaren didn’t get that yesterday. That was the difference.
“We literally turned the car upside down set-up-wise. He’s worked very hard with the engineering team. Finally we were able to give him a car that he could make use of in Q3 yesterday with the most stunning lap and then convert that today in a hard-fought victory, in a straight fight.
“It puts him one point behind in the drivers championship.
“We leave Japan still with plenty of work to do but huge motivation.”
Red Bull Racing has been off the pace but not by miles, and the team expects to get its car into a more comfortable position sooner rather than later. It also expects to benefit from rule changes in June tightening the rules around flexing front wings.
It’s a reminder that RBR is only dormant, not inactive.
“We don’t need these kinds of reminders,” Stella said.
“Hopefully at some other circuits we will be in condition to use the full potential of the car, which I think still remains the best car.
“We need to work, and this is not only the drivers; this is above all a message for the team. We need to nail all the opportunities that ultimately deliver performance.”
McLaren has a strong head start in the constructors championship and two drivers who can surely deliver it by the end of the season.
But the drivers title is far more volatile. If it wants the double, it can’t afford even the minor mistakes it made in Japan.