Max Verstappen handed painful title prediction despite 'class of the field' label

Former F1 team principal Otmar Szafnauer does not believe Max Verstappen will cause a title upset and beat both McLaren drivers to the championship.

Verstappen currently sits 36 points down on the tile lead, a margin that was as big as 104 just a handful of races ago.

The Dutchman admitted after his US Grand Prix victory that he needed to be “perfect” to bring home a fifth straight title, but last time out in Mexico City, Lando Norris dominated the race while Verstappen was only third on the road.

Norris' performance allowed the Briton to move to the top of the championship by one point over team-mate Oscar Piastri.

Speaking exclusively to RacingNews365, Szafnauer sees the McLaren duo as the primary contenders and has backed one of them to emerge victorious at the end of the year.

“You've got to go with a McLaren driver, even though Max is the class of the field,” he said.

“I’ve always said it, from here on out to the end, the driver that makes the least amount of mistakes or has the least failures, will win it. It’s hard to predict DNFs.

“It’s hard for me to tell from the outside, but it seems like at the beginning, Lando was perhaps pushing a little bit too much because Oscar was a bigger challenge than he anticipated from the year before.

“Lando has now got used to that, and he’s back to driving like he can and doing a good job. His win was pretty dominant.”

Both Verstappen and Piastri were denied a late chance to move up one position each due to a virtual safety car that was deployed in the closing stages in Mexico.

Szafnauer highlighted that due to their respective positions in the championship, the risk levels would have varied greatly in their approach to making an overtake stick.

“It’s tight. Another lap without the virtual safety car, Max would have tried to pass Leclerc,” he said.

“At the same time, I think Oscar would have tried on Bearman, but I think Max would have been a little bit more risk-taking in the pass, and Oscar would have been a little bit more risk-averse.

“If Oscar comes together with him, you lose all the points. But that didn’t happen, and now it is quite tight.”