Why is Max Verstappen often beating McLaren’s ‘faster’ car to pole in F1 2025?

As if there was any doubt, McLaren’s crushing 1-2 win in Formula 1’s Miami GP further confirmed the papaya team remains well on top in racing conditions, especially when rear tyre wear is critical. So why is Max Verstappen regularly beating Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri to pole?

Piastri led Norris home for his third consecutive win, and McLaren’s fifth out of six races so far this season, with Mercedes’ George Russell 37 seconds behind in third and Verstappen shipping an alarming 40 seconds. It confirms a trend that when rear tyre wear and overheating is a massive problem, McLaren can really flex its muscle and simply drive away from the competition once Pirelli’s rubber starts degrading.

It is no coincidence that the one race Verstappen has managed to win was Suzuka’s Japanese Grand Prix, which was an ‘easy’ one-stop race in which the four-time world champion was able to defend his pole position on a circuit where overtaking was almost impossible, and McLaren didn’t exploit the few strategic options available.

But while McLaren is unmatched in race trim, it hasn’t been quite as dominant in qualifying. Verstappen leads the way with three poles in six, followed by two for Piastri and one for Norris. In Miami, Mercedes’ Andrea Kimi Antonelli pipped both squads to sprint pole, while Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton did so in China. Verstappen’s Suzuka pole was seen as the most impressive of the lot, with his Miami performance not far behind given he was also running a higher-mileage Honda engine that cost him time accelerating down Miami’s two straights in sectors two and three.

The murkier picture in qualifying has fed discussions over how much faster the McLaren really is over one lap, and triggered some psychological warfare between the two teams over the role their drivers are playing in their Saturday form.

When discussing Verstappen’s third pole of the season, Horner was quick to point out the Dutchman’s aptitude for rising to the occasion. “I think like any great sportsman or woman, it’s those big-pressure moments. It’s that last set of tyres when the pressure is at its most extreme,” Horner told Sky on Saturday. “Time and again he has delivered, and that’s his third pole in six races now against expectations.

“McLaren looked like they had us covered in Q2, but it’s about going and doing the lap, and Max is a master at that. He’s having to dig deep because on balance we probably are a tenth or two down on the McLaren.”

By praising Verstappen’s ability to deal with “big-pressure moments” in an inferior car, Horner effectively suggests the world champion has an edge on his rivals in that department. It’s a claim quite a few observers will agree with, especially given the popular narrative around Norris, but McLaren team boss Andrea Stella holds a different view.

Yes, the McLaren MCL39 has more potential over one lap, but it appears as though its drivers are both struggling to reliably wring it out of the papaya car. That manifested itself early on with Norris’ well-documented problems gelling with the car, which has undergone quite substantial changes compared to the 2024 machinery he got on much better with. But while Piastri has coped better in general, he too missed out on a few pole chances, most notably at Suzuka and now in Miami too by making a mistake into Turn 1.

What appears to be happening is that the McLaren is mighty quick in most circumstances, but when pushing the very edge of the envelope it seems like the car’s ‘numb’ front axle isn’t giving the drivers the necessary amount of information about what to expect. That means that neither Norris nor Piastri are reliably able to predict what the car will do and whether it will lock its front tyres, and therefore they struggle to replicate their performance in certain corners.

“We have now enough statistics to confirm that the car is easier to exploit in race simulation runs than on a single lap in qualifying trim and new tyres,” Stella explained. “So far we haven’t had any perfect lap, maybe the best was Oscar’s lap in Bahrain. But otherwise, especially when it comes to front-end locking and braking, it’s a car that offers its best when you are in continuous laps rather than the one-off lap in which you push 100%.

“On a solid engineering basis, we are trying to understand and make some adjustments to see if we can give them a car that is just slightly more predictable and rich in information in terms of how the grip is when driving the car at the limit.”

That’s why Stella argues the reason why his drivers are being beaten to poles with scrappy Q3 laps is more down to technical reasons McLaren is trying to address than driver performance, and he therefore appeared annoyed at Red Bull’s line of reasoning that it’s always down to Verstappen making the difference.

“Red Bull are very good at making fast cars, exceptionally good at driving fast cars and they are extremely good also in creating the narrative to their advantage,” he said when Motorsport.com put Horner’s above comments to him. “They exploit every possible opportunity to stay in the competition and some of these opportunities are to sometimes create the narrative like: ‘Oh, we are making miracles here, the others should win every single practice session and qualifying and race’.

“This is the narrative created by some of our competitors, which we read occasionally and then we change the page, and we focus on ourselves. We look at the facts, we look at what we should be improving and there’s a lot that we should be improving.”

That leads to a more philosophical question. Is a car really faster if it doesn’t allow drivers to reliably exploit that potential?

“I don’t think we can distinguish what the [better] car is. The better car [means] the performance that you can realise with the car, it’s not the absolute potential. Occasionally we can produce really good corners, but it’s difficult to be repeatable for our drivers. Oscar made a comment after a Q2 lap: ‘Wow, this Turn 1 was so good, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to repeat because I’m not sure exactly how I made it, because the car didn’t give me a great feeling as to how this was happening.’

“It’s a car that doesn’t give you much queuing, which is the technical word we use. And this means that it’s not easy for our drivers to repeat some big performances that we can see in individual laps. So, what is the better car? Is it the car that may have more potential but is more difficult to exploit? Or a car that may have a little bit less peak potential but is more sincere to exploit?”

Perhaps the truth is somewhere in the middle, but as the F1 calendar hits Europe it will be fascinating to see how the 2025 qualifying battle develops. Red Bull and McLaren are both readying upgrades while the FIA’s stricter front wing flex test is expected to shake things up in Spain. Can McLaren come up with machinery that is easier to drive on the limit, or will front wing changes peg the papaya cars back as some rivals believe?

Additional reporting by Ronald Vording