This season, we’ve seen one of the greatest comebacks in the history of Formula One. Max Verstappen, after falling behind by 104 points due to unfortunate circumstances, including a lack of car performance, is now just 26 points behind 2nd-place Lando Norris and just 40 points behind championship leader Oscar Piastri. But how exactly did a gap so big get shrunk to just a couple of points?

The season started off dramatically. The first race ended with Lando winning and leading the championship after being aggressively hunted by Verstappen for the last few laps. Not only was this Norris’ first time leading the World Drivers’ Championship, but it ended Max’s astonishing and unmatched record of 1,029 consecutive days leading the championship. After McLaren’s significant performance improvement in the second half of 2024, we expected that Norris and Piastri, although obviously worse than Verstappen, were given a car that could finally help them close the gap.

McLaren’s improvement also coincided with a severe drop in Red Bull’s performance. After the head aerodynamic designer, Adrian Newey, resigned from the Milton Keynes-based outfit to join Lawrence Stroll and Fernando Alonso at Aston Martin for 2025, we’ve noticed RedBull no longer being the best team, with teams like Ferrari, Mercedes, and most notably McLaren picking up wins and podiums rather than the continuous RedBull 1-2s we experienced in 2023.

For the first 15 races this year, all of us thought that the championship would go down to Piastri and Norris. The two decent drivers who were given the dominant car had to have been the leading contenders, right? After Oscar Piastri took the championship lead shortly after Norris, we’ve seen a mediocre battle between the two, which has mainly been nullified by team orders and the greatly resented “papaya rules.” This McLaren battle began to be intruded upon in Monza. Max Verstappen, in his usual dominant fashion, achieved pole position and won the race.

Max Verstappen finished 2nd at Melbourne, Jeddah, Montreal, Zandvoort, and Marina Bay. He also won at Suzuka, Imola, Monza, Baku, and most recently, Austin. He has more pole positions than both McLaren drivers and, after Austin, has tied with Lando Norris on wins. All of the aforementioned performances, combined with Norris’s 3 DNFs (Montreal, Zandvoort, and the Austin sprint) and Piastri’s 2 DNFs (Baku and the Austin sprint), have given Verstappen chances to maximize his points (see what I did there?) and have allowed him to close an impossibly large-to-overcome gap of 104 points to a measly 40 points with 5 races and 2 sprints yet to come.

This weekend, the travelling circus of Formula One heads to Mexico. The most successful driver ever in Mexico just so happens to be (you guessed it) Max Verstappen, who picked up wins in CDMX in 2017, 2018, 2021, 2022, and 2023. Meanwhile, neither Lando Norris nor Oscar Piastri has ever won in Mexico, and the former has only achieved a single podium in Mexico City. Can Verstappen close the gap even more on Sunday? Will we get another McLaren double-DNF like we did in Texas? Although we don’t have full knowledge of what will happen during the race, we do know that, however ahead of the pack the papaya-orange McLarens are, the Dutch Lion isn’t far behind.