Max Verstappen in the Red Bull at the 2025 Japanese Grand Prix. Illustrative image, not from Brazil. Photo: Liauzh / Wikimedia Commons (<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA 4.0</a>)
Max Verstappen went from 21st on the grid to second at Interlagos, and the highlight reel will tell you that’s the whole story. It isn’t. The more useful details are smaller and less flattering: the penalty cost him less than it looks, the weather did him a favour, and the moment Red Bull put him on slicks, the car moved somewhere he couldn’t follow.
A 30-place penalty that cost five places
Start with the arithmetic. Verstappen was out in Q1 on Saturday, classified 16th on a 1:31.238 after just nine laps. The official grid then applied a 30-place drop for additional power unit elements and slotted him 21st. Strip out the headline number and the penalty moved him back five places.
Red Bull’s team principal, Laurent Mekies, said the change wasn’t planned and that a small issue on Friday forced it. My read, and it is only a read: if you are going to be forced to take a power unit penalty, doing it on a weekend where the car has already missed Q2 and the forecast is wet is about the cheapest place to eat it. Compare Charles Leclerc, who dropped ten places for the same reason from fourth, and whose Sunday ended in eighth after a post-race five-second penalty of his own.
Where the race was won, and where it wasn’t
The drive itself was real. Verstappen was eighth by lap 5, stopped at the end of lap 17 and again at the end of lap 45, and by the middle of the race he was running second. He finished 14.602 seconds behind Lando Norris and 18 points richer.
But second was a ceiling, not a near miss. Mekies said McLaren were generally a bit faster than Red Bull in the race, and that he thought Norris would have had the legs on Verstappen even if the Dutchman had started second. Norris, for his part, had to recover an eight-second deficit after a poor start to take a win from pole. That is not the profile of a race a faster Red Bull threw away.
The slicks problem nobody put on a podium
Here’s the detail I’d circle. When Red Bull switched Verstappen to dry tyres, he reported a lot of oversteer that made the car hard to drive, and it improved when he went back to intermediates. Mekies described a significant change in balance that made things more difficult. Verstappen also floated the idea that the car may have picked up damage after his first stint, which Red Bull says it still needs to understand.
It wasn’t uniquely a Red Bull issue. Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli and George Russell reported similar balance trouble, and Pirelli’s read was mainly thermal degradation, with graining on the right side as the track dried. That context matters, because it points to a narrow operating window rather than a one-team fault. It also explains why the intermediate stints looked so much better than the slick ones. A car and power unit package still in its first year together doesn’t get many free passes when conditions are marginal, and Interlagos spent most of Sunday being marginal.
The honest takeaway is that Red Bull banked a good result on a day when its own tools couldn’t tell it how good the car was. Mekies said as much about the climb itself, noting that no simulation would have predicted a P21-to-P2 finish. A strategy built on simulations that can’t see that is a strategy worth watching.
Hadjar’s quiet case
The other Red Bull deserves more than the footnote it will get. Isack Hadjar started fifth, reached second, and ran wide at Turn 1, after which the team told him to let Verstappen through. Mekies said the places could have been swapped back later but weren’t, because the rain grew heavy enough to separate the cars and make the question moot. Hadjar finished third, 24.485 seconds behind Norris, and Mekies called it his best race for the team on pure pace. If you want the longer version of how the two have stacked up, Backfire looked at that record earlier this autumn.
What it does for second place
The points matter more than the pace here. Kimi Antonelli clinched the title in Mexico and leads on 390. Behind him, Verstappen sits second on 279, with Russell on 262 and Hamilton on 261. That is the fight Red Bull is actually in, and Backfire covered how tight it was before Brazil in our look at the second-to-fifth gap. A wet-race salvage worth 18 points protects that cushion, whatever it says about the car.
So the useful question for the rest of the year isn’t whether Verstappen can drive from 21st. We know that, and so does Interlagos, where he has now turned a 17th-place start into a win and a pit-lane start into third in the last two years before this one. It’s whether Red Bull can find out what the car did on slicks before a dry race asks the same question and offers no rain to hide behind.
Lead image: Max Verstappen in the Red Bull RB21 at the 2025 Japanese Grand Prix. File photo, not from Brazil. Photo: Liauzh / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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