Max Verstappen admits title fight slipping away after Qatar sprint struggle: “This track doesn’t suit us at all”. Max Verstappen finished 4th in the 2025 Qatar GP sprint.

Fourth place in the Sprint for Max Verstappen leaves him 25 points behind Lando Norris in the championship standings.

Chasing improvements

The final Sprint of the season did not go Verstappen’s way. In Qatar, the Dutch driver finished Saturday’s short race in fourth, recovering from P6 on the grid and attempting in the early laps to challenge Lando Norris’ McLaren ahead, but without success. In the championship, Norris now holds a 25-point lead over Max Verstappen, while Oscar Piastri gained three points on the reigning champion after the two had arrived in Lusail tied. If Verstappen cannot finish ahead of Norris in tomorrow’s Grand Prix, his hopes of defending the title will effectively end.

The underlying issue, as Max Verstappen explained to journalists after the race, is Red Bull’s adaptation to the Lusail circuit. The Qatari track highlights all of McLaren’s strengths, while the Dutch driver’s RB21 suffers from bouncing problems that have so far proven impossible to fully solve or mitigate. “We need to try to fix the bouncing and oversteer issues because on these long corners it’s difficult to drive the car, it’s a problem,” commented the world champion.

Max Verstappen on improving the car

“Improving the car? I think it’s going to be tough,” Max Verstappen admitted. “It seems this track isn’t really suited to our car. We’ll try everything to improve it because it’s not fun to drive like this. We need to make it more comfortable, so I feel more at ease on track. We have to focus on the areas we can improve, and that’s what we’ll attempt to do. If that works, maybe we can get closer. But right now, I simply couldn’t fight with them [the McLarens]. I didn’t have the pace. We need to make the car more stable, fix the bouncing, and improve front-end grip because there’s a big issue here: front tyre wear is very high, so we need to work on that as well.” – the Dutchman concluded at the end of the Qatar Sprint race.

Red Bull’s engineers face a long night ahead if they are to give their driver a car capable of stopping McLaren’s dominance around the Losail International Circuit.