Max Verstappen says his only realistic chance of beating McLaren in F1 2025 is at circuits where it is difficult to overtake, such is the dominance of the Woking team.

McLaren have won all but one race this season and are heavy favourites for both the Drivers’ and Constructors’ titles, leaving Verstappen with a huge task if he is to retain the number one on his car.

Max Verstappen paints pessimistic prediction of title win chances

Verstappen, who opts to use the number one as the reigning champion is permitted to do so, last used his traditional number of 33 in 2021, but it is looking increasingly likely that he will back to that next season given the advantage McLaren enjoys over the chasing pack.

Oscar Piastri’s three wins in as many races saw him move to the top of the standings while Lando Norris still has a 16-point advantage over P3 Verstappen.

Asked where he could claw some momentum back, Verstappen admitted that he would be relying on tracks that are difficult to overtake for any realistic chance of a win.

“I’m looking forward to some tracks that I enjoy driving but with the gap that they have, realistically, you don’t really have a big chance,” he told media including PlanetF1.com.

“But maybe on tracks where you can’t pass, you do have a chance. We’ll see Monaco, maybe will be.

“Monaco has not been our strongest track in the past, multiple times. Sometimes it all comes together, that’s for sure, but of course you can’t bank on it the whole time.”

While the rest of the grid is happy to concede McLaren is the quickest, the team themselves have so far been hesitant in accepting their position as the title favourites.

Speaking after the race in Miami, team principal Andrea Stella admitted the gap between his drivers and Verstappen had surprised him.

“I’m a little surprised that the gap we had today is as big as we saw,” the 54-year-old Italian said.

“I thought that we could have had an advantage from the tyre management point of view, but I didn’t think that the tyre management advantage would lead to this level of gap.

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“Yesterday, when we made the comments about competitors, we commented on the performance in qualifying and I think myself, I admitted that the car doesn’t perform as well as we want it in qualifying.

“It becomes a little difficult to be exploited at the limit in new tyres and empty fuel tanks but clearly in the race, when you put consecutive laps together and you have a little bit of degradation in hot conditions, then it looks like the car performs very well.

“I want to go back to saying that that’s a result of some very targeted engineering work.

“If you had asked me before the season, I would said we have invested in improving the interaction with the tyres, but I wouldn’t have said that the extent would have been the one that we see in this kind of race.”

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