Lando Norris vs Max Verstappen: the smallest percentage gap ever between first and second. Lando Norris defeated Max Verstappen for the 2025 Formula 1 World Championship by just two points.

A minimal gap. Six Sprint races and twenty-four traditional Grands Prix: this was the enormous, incredibly long structure of the 2025 Formula 1 World Championship, a season that kept fans glued to their screens right up to the very final lap of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. In the end, after a spectacular three-way fight that lasted all year, it was Lando Norris who emerged as champion, bringing the Drivers’ title back to McLaren after seventeen years and adding his name, for the very first time, to the prestigious list of Formula 1 World Champions.

The third place that Lando Norris scored at the Yas Marina Circuit was just enough to secure the crown with a final margin of only two points over Max Verstappen, who finished second in the standings. Just two points out of a total of 648 points available throughout the entire championship — a detail highlighted by journalist Simone Valtieri of Motorbox. In percentage terms, never before in the long and storied history of Formula 1 has the gap between first and second been so incredibly small.

Never this close in percentage

In the collective memory of Formula 1 fans, one particular statistic has always remained iconic — and almost certainly unbeatable in absolute terms: the half-point that separated Niki Lauda and Alain Prost in the 1984 season, which crowned the Austrian champion. But that Formula 1 campaign had a very different structure: a calendar of sixteen Grands Prix, of which only the best eleven results for each driver were counted, and a points system where nine points were awarded for a win. Under those conditions, the maximum possible score was 99 points. That famous half-point gap between the two legendary McLaren teammates therefore represented a difference of 0.69%.

This time, however, Lando Norris and Max Verstappen managed to go even closer. Their two-point gap corresponds to a percentage difference of just 0.47% — an all-time record and one that will be extremely difficult to beat, unless a championship ends in an exact tie on points.

This very particular ranking places at third position the last Drivers’ World Championship title won by Ferrari: the memorable 2007 season. In that year, Kimi Raikkonen finished the championship just one point ahead of both Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, making it the closest triple finish in the history of the sport. To this day, these remain the only cases in which the final championship gap between drivers at the end of the season has stayed below the threshold of one percent.