Was Imola a one-off or is Verstappen now a title contender?

IMOLA, Italy — For 63 laps Sunday, Max Verstappen returned to his happy place. Against the bucolic backdrop of Imola’s Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari, he was once again controlling a grand prix from the cockpit of his Red Bull: performance on tap, Pirelli tires in their sweet spot, rivals firmly in his rearview mirrors.

When everything falls into place for Verstappen, the four-time F1 world champion looks unstoppable. Regardless of McLaren’s strategy, the timing of safety cars or the best efforts of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, nothing was able to derail Verstappen’s charge to his second win of the season.

His only other race victory this year — at the Japanese Grand Prix in early April — was won in spite of his car’s behavior, but this one had all the hallmarks of man and machine working in harmony. It was almost enough to make Verstappen’s 22-point deficit to Piastri in the championship standings — a gap that had only grown between his Japan and Imola victories — look trivial.

Even in the baking heat of the Italian sun, though, one swallow does not make a summer. And as impressive as Verstappen’s performance was, question marks remain over how repeatable it will be across the rest of the season.

Verstappen unbeatable in Imola

Verstappen’s victory was set in motion by his remarkable overtake on Piastri into the first corner of the race. Piastri, seemingly with one eye on George Russell’s Mercedes directly behind him, braked relatively early for the entry to Tamburello and left a Red Bull-sized space on the outside that Verstappen was only ever going to exploit.

“I thought I had it pretty under control, so it was a good move from Max,” Piastri said. “Yeah, I’ll learn for next time, clearly. At that point, I wasn’t overly concerned to not be in the lead, but then our pace just wasn’t as strong as I expected, so that compounded that first corner.”

As Piastri said, the move proved critical to the result of the race, and its importance was matched by the level of bravery, skill and precision needed to pull it off.

“Oscar left the slightest of gaps and Max just sent it,” Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said after the race. “It was win it or bin it. And again, he’s just so good in that situation where he just sees a gap and it’s so decisive for him.”

From that point onward, Verstappen was in control.

As has been the case all season, the lead car can make the most of clean air to manage its tires to best effect, while a following car can’t help but damage its rubber while running in the wake of a rival. Running behind Verstappen, the strain on Piastri’s front right tire was starting to become visible after just 10 laps, and the graining of the rubber was already limiting his ability to keep pace with the Red Bull.

Before the race, a one-stop strategy seemed to be the best route to victory, certainly if leading after the first lap, but a two-stop was also a viable option on paper.

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Verstappen overtakes Piastri at the start of the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix

Oscar Piastri loses his lead on the first lap of the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix.

“I think Plan A is very ambitious at the moment,” Piastri said over team radio, referring to his chances of making a one-stop strategy work.

The McLaren pit wall agreed and ordered car 81 into the pits at the end of Lap 13. It was a decision that Piastri’s race never truly recovered from, but one McLaren was still willing to defend Sunday evening.

“I think at the time, Oscar’s tires were going off by a good chunk and Oscar was passing some feedback that that was the case,” team principal Andrea Stella said. “It was unclear entering this event whether it would have been a one- or a two-stop. If it was a two, [Lap 13] was the time to go.

“And if the hard tires had behaved just a little bit better, then the two-stop would have been a very strong strategy, despite having to overtake some other cars. But once he went on hard tires, actually it wasn’t much faster than Lando and Max that stayed out on the used medium.

“I think the hard tires were a little less competitive than we thought, but we needed to deviate and create the condition to beat Max today. So I think this is something that you can only judge in hindsight, but if you deviate, that was the time to go for a two-stop.

“So no regrets. Ultimately, for the team it’s the same outcome, and for Oscar it could have been the way to win, and sometimes when you take some risks to win, there may be a little bit of a downside.”

A Virtual Safety Car (VSC) on Lap 29 to recover Esteban Ocon’s broken-down Haas then presented an opportunity for the whole field to pit just before the midway point of the race. Unfortunately for McLaren, Norris had made his only pit stop the lap before the VSC and therefore did not benefit from the same time-efficient pit stop Verstappen enjoyed a lap later. The result was a 20-second gap between the two once both had made their pit stops and racing at normal speed had resumed.

The VSC also encouraged Piastri to make his second pit stop earlier than planned on lap 30, meaning he had completed his two-stop strategy without benefitting from the offset tire advantage to the one-stoppers and used up all his useful race tires.

Piastri went into the race with only one set of medium tires and two hards left in his allocation, while his three sets of used soft ones from qualifying would be of little use in racing conditions. That might not have been such a big issue had the race run to the end as normal, but when a safety car came out on Lap 46, he no longer had any fresh medium or hard tires to switch to, and therefore had to remain on track as Verstappen and Norris both pitted for their last remaining set of hards.

Piastri moved up to second place as a result of his teammate’s pit stop under the safety car, but with tires 17 laps older when racing resumed, he was unable to keep Norris behind. As the two McLarens fought it out for the final places on the podium, Verstappen disappeared into the distance for victory.

The way the race panned out clearly worked against McLaren, but for the first time this year, it was also clear that Red Bull had the better race car.

“I think today we attempted to unlock various scenarios to try and beat Max, but at no stage I think we saw that we had enough race pace,” Stella said. “Even with the final safety car, Lando could pass Oscar and try to push as much as possible, but pretty much Max was responding to Lando.”

Is Verstappen back in the title fight?

The high-speed corners that give the Imola circuit its old-school appeal undoubtedly played to the strengths of Red Bull over McLaren. Compared with the clumsy, slow-speed sections of Miami that suited the McLaren so well two weeks ago, Imola was always likely to provide a more balanced battle between the two fastest cars on the grid.

“After coming from a race like Miami, in which our pace was very strong, we knew that because of the track layout and the slightly different ambient conditions this race would have been just more balanced from a race pace point of view,” Stella said. “But I have to say, today we were still a little surprised by the pace of Red Bull, which was very competitive.

“Well done to Max, well done to Red Bull, for being able to pull off this kind of performance, which meant that the race was very much decided by the swap of position between Oscar and Max in Corner 1. After that we tried to chase him, but effectively we didn’t have enough race pace today to be able to beat Max, taking the lead after Lap 1.”

Horner added: “This win was sort of unthinkable two weeks ago [in Miami]. I think it’s an important win for the team at this stage of the championship. It feels like we’re building a little bit of momentum behind the scenes. The factory, everybody behind the scenes, is working incredibly hard. It’s a timely win championship-wise; it keeps the pressure on and keeps us in touch.”

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Verstappen surprised by Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix win

Red Bull’s Max Verstappen reacts to winning the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix.

Red Bull brought upgrades to the floor of its car in Miami and supplemented them with further tweaks in Imola. During Friday’s two practice sessions, the car remained difficult to drive, but setup changes ahead of the last practice Saturday finally started to unlock lap time that had been inaccessible at any point earlier in the year.

“We still have work to do, but I do think it’s been a very positive weekend for us,” Verstappen said. “Of course, we brought upgrades and I think they worked. Friday was very difficult still, but then I think we found a better setup for Saturday, and I just hope that we can use that a bit more often because it definitely brought the car in a better window.”

By finding a balance that stopped the car from sliding, Verstappen was able to look after his tires, which in turn offered better degradation management and more pace in the race.

The question now is whether the step forward in Imola will translate to similar performances at other circuits. Figuring out how much of Verstappen’s performance was circuit-specific and how much was genuine progress will be at the forefront of both Red Bull’s and McLaren’s data analysis from Sunday. Fortunately, next weekend’s race through the slow-speed corners of Monaco’s famous street circuit could hold a clear answer.

“I do think, again, this track has quite a few high-speed corners, which I think our car likes,” Verstappen added. “I also think we took a step forward with the setup of the car, which helps, but Monaco is, of course, very, very different. So, let’s see how we are going to perform there. Last year was very difficult for us. I don’t expect it to be a lot easier this time around because there’s a lot of low-speed, but we’ll see.

“I mean, it’s just one race on the calendar, where you try to do the best you can. Even after that, there’s a lot of races left, but, of course, you can clearly see that once we go to high-speed tracks and corners, then we are more competitive.”

For McLaren, the reaction to Sunday’s defeat will be analytical rather than knee-jerk. Allowing for the anomaly that was Verstappen’s remarkable victory in Japan, the first six races showed the MCL39 as the class of the field, and that will likely be the case again across a wide range of circuits remaining on the calendar. Nevertheless, the championship leaders are very aware that their closest rival might have made a significant step forward.

“We will have to look at the data, we will have to look at the behavior of the tires and their thermal regime, but I think what’s happening today is a combination [of factors],” Stella said. “Red Bull, I think they have improved; they’ve been developing their car over the last couple of races and I think they have taken a step forward.

“And then if we look at the speed of the corners and we compare with the speed in Miami, the car operates in a completely different part of the aerodynamic maps here, and I think we know that our car is strong in track layouts like Miami or Bahrain or China, but when it comes to high-speed corners like we have here in Imola, I don’t think we enjoy any particular advantage.

“So the track layout, the progress of Red Bull, I think they are the two factors that meant that we didn’t have much advantage today.”