If the championship had not taken such a decisive turn, the person in the spotlight after Brazil would have been Verstappen. Even in the circumstances, the Dutchman shone brightest of all, with one of the performances of his career.
A year ago at this race, Verstappen put himself on the brink of a fourth world title with a quite brilliant comeback drive from 17th on the grid to win.
It was one of the all-time great drives, but it was in the wet, when these sorts of things are more possible.
On Sunday, in a dry race, Verstappen finished third after starting from the pit lane. Right on the gearbox of Antonelli’s Mercedes, the car in second.
And he did it despite a puncture on the sixth lap that forced an early pit stop that dropped him from the 13th place he had by then recovered to, right to the back.
“Incredible,” was the word Verstappen used to describe it. “He did an amazing job,” said Antonelli. “Sensational,” added Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies.
What was all the more remarkable was that Red Bull had lacked pace all weekend. Verstappen finished the sprint fourth, complaining of a lack of grip. It would have been fifth had it not been for Piastri’s crash.
And for the grand prix, Verstappen qualified only 16th, the first time in his entire career he had been knocked out in the first part of qualifying on pace.
Realising changes they had made to the car for qualifying had gone the wrong way, Red Bull chose to modify the set-up for the race. They stuck with the decision to abandon the new floor introduced in Mexico, but made a bunch of other tweaks, including fitting a new engine.
This breaks the rules that say teams cannot change the car’s set-up once qualifying has started; hence the pit lane start.
In a way, although the puncture put him to the back again after he had made up six places over the three racing laps that had been possible up to that point in between a real safety car and a virtual one, it did him a favour in that it got him off the hard tyre and on to the favoured medium.
Once the race was properly under way, he began to pick his way through the field, to the extent that by the time Norris made his final stop on lap 54, with 17 to go, the person who inherited the lead was Verstappen.
“Not bad,” he said over the radio when his engineer Gianpiero Lambiase informed him of this.
It looked like he might stay out – and try to defend the lead – and in fact some rival engineers believe he should have done. That he could even have won had Red Bull committed early to two stints on the medium from that first stop and Verstappen managed his tyres accordingly.
But Mekies disagreed, saying: “I don’t think there was any way we could have got the P1 if you just look at it.”
And so did McLaren team principal Andrea Stella: “The level of degradation was very high, and at some stage I think the tyres just ran out of rubber,” he said.
“I think they knew at Red Bull that it would have been quite a significant gamble to go to the end with the same set, and considering the fact that they had a new soft to put on, I think that was the right thing to do.”
