Verstappen Knows McLaren And Norris 'Need To Have Perfect End To Year' To Catch Up

Thursday, 19 September 2024 at 10:50

Red Bull F1 driver Max Verstappen asserted McLaren with Lando Norris needs to have a perfect finish of the season if they are to catch him in the Championship.

With seven race weekends to go until the end of the season, Max Verstappen led the Drivers' Championship by 59 points ahead of McLaren Racing driver Lando Norris.

This meant that Norris needed to close the gap to the triple World Champion by more than 8,4 points on average every weekend if he still wanted to win the title.

Although it isn't impossible, Red Bull isn't standing still with its development and is also making progress. Their new upgrade in Baku worked, and Verstappen stays confident, saying the Papaya team needs to have a perfect end to the season if they still want to turn things around. As quoted by GpBlog, he said:

"I think if we do a better job ourselves, they [McLaren] need to have a perfect end to the year."

This weekend's Singapore Grand Prix is not expected to be Red Bull's strongest race, but the Milton Keynes team has some big upgrades in the pipeline for the following race weekend in Austin.

Read also

Sky Sports' David Croft Responds After 'British Bias' Criticism From Newey

Plus, another important factor in the Championship is that Norris needs to win most races if he plans to win it, and that is going to be very challenging considering how closely matched all the top four teams are.

When the 26-year-old F1 driver was asked whether several drivers fighting for each victory is an advantage for him, he replied:

"I guess in a way, yeah. But I don't like to, of course, always be P6 myself. We need to do a bit better. Sunday already showed that, for example, with Checo, when he was a bit happier, the car was performing a bit better."

"We are in the fight. Okay, maybe we didn't win, but we were in that fight with Checo. So I think from now onwards, we can be in that fight constantly, if we keep improving the car step by step a little bit after our findings."