After Max Verstappen beat Lando Norris to pole in Miami despite having, according to Red Bull, the lesser car, Norris says it’s “impossible” to know the actual difference between the two cars. The main difference is actually with the drivers.

Despite rivals’ claims that McLaren’s MCL39 is undoubtedly the dominant car, Verstappen clinched his third Grand Prix pole position of the F1 2025 championship at the Miami Grand Prix.

Is Max Verstappen getting more out of his car than Lando Norris?

But while he has 50 per cent of the season’s Grand Prix poles, he has just one victory with a P1 at the Japanese Grand Prix where he narrowly beat the McLaren team-mates, Norris second and Oscar Piastri P3.

Red Bull celebrated their reigning World Champion’s latest pole position, with team boss Christian Horner calling it “another stunning performance” and “really impressive”.

However, McLaren team boss Andrea Stella hit back at what he called Red Bull’s “making miracles” narrative.

“Red Bull, they are very good at making fast cars, they are very exceptionally good I would say at driving fast cars and they are extremely good also in creating the narrative to their advantage,” Stella told the media in Miami.

“They exploit every possible opportunity to stay in the competition and some of these opportunities sometimes is to create the narrative like: ‘oh we are making miracles here, the others should win every single practice session and qualifying and race’.

“But 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 and when we focus on ourselves we look at the numbers, we look at the facts, we look at what we should be improving and there’s a lot that we should be improving.”

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Norris weighed in on it when he was questioned about whether he felt Verstappen was getting more out of his car than the McLaren team-mates.

He, however, says there is no way McLaren can say whether he’s punching above the car’s weight, nor can Red Bull make claims about McLaren’s car.

“Impossible to know what car he’s got compared to us,” Norris insisted. “The advantage we have is two quick drivers and they don’t, or we have a car that’s capable of allowing drivers to drive it quicker.

“But yeah, impossible to know, impossible to actually know the difference between the two cars.”

McLaren’s advantage, at least according to some rivals, has been put down to everything from the team’s alleged flexible wings to tyre water tricks to the MCL39’s rear brake design.

The latter was, according to The Race, recently in the spotlight with the FIA conducting a thorough inspection of the braking system, ducts and drums, in the wake of McLaren’s dominant 1-2 in Miami.

The report claims the brakes were declared legal, just a clever design.

Piastri, who won the Miami race 37 seconds up the road from the nearest non-Red Bull driver, was asked where he thought his advantage had come from and claimed it was “unexpected”.

“I did a lot of things right today,” he said in the post-race press conference, “but there was some good fortune there as well, and a very quick car. I don’t want to rely on that every single Sunday.

“Clearly, this is the exception to the pace we’ve had this year. Yes, we’ve always had a strong car, but the pace we had today from lap one it felt like was unexpected, even for us.

“I’ll definitely take the performance and we’ll try and work out how to do that every weekend, but there’s still definitely things to work on from a personal side and from a team point of view.”

Piastri leads the Drivers’ Championship by 16 points ahead of Norris with Verstappen a further 16 off the pace. McLaren have a huge 105-point lead over Mercedes in the teams’ standings where Red Bull are a further 36 down.

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