How Red Bull former designer Adrian Newey must have been eating his words on Sunday night watching four-time world champion Max Verstappen swoop through the Jeddah Corniche with the RB21 for a P2 finish and 18 points at the Saudi Arabian Formula One Grand Prix.
Had it not been for the tussle with race winner Oscar Piastri at the start of the race, Verstappen would surely convert his pole position into another victory, like he did at Suzuka weeks ago.
Verstappen and Piastri went wheel to wheel into turn one, and ended up cutting Turn 2 to retain his lead.
The stewards eventually penalised the Dutch-Belgian racer.
Like the arrival of Afrikaans in the South African national anthem, Verstappen found pace out of the blue in Jeddah. This comes after weeks of complaints that the car was “not right”.
Having finished 2.8 seconds behind Piastri, the 27-year-old said his performance on Sunday night was much better than how things went when the team started practising on Friday.
"The positives are that of course, in the race, we had quite good pace. Compared to Friday, we improved a lot because on Friday, we were struggling a lot on the tyres, and I surprised myself in that first stint. I didn’t expect that we could actually pull away a little bit.
“On the hard tyre, I have to say that it was a little bit more difficult, I had too much understeer in the car and then you can’t really attack corners, but overall, still a very good race for us,” Verstappen said.
Going for his fifth straight world title, Verstappen is not confident the team have rectified the issues bogging the RB21, but rather just raced a circuit that suited their car.
“I do think that we have found a really good set-up on our car but also, this track suits our car a bit better, plus the degradation is quite low.
“I think we know that we still have things to improve on the car, and we just need to get a few updates on the car to help that. Some tracks will be better, some will be a bit worse,” the 27-year-old champion said.
Piastri became the only Australian driver since Mark Webber in 2010 to lead the standings at 99 points.
His win at Jeddah has ensured one thing: the road to the final race is likely to be a dog-fight between the two McLaren drivers and Verstappen.
Piastri said Verstappen was a bit too close to him during the final laps of the race, but was still happy to be the only driver in the paddock with multiple wins this season.
“It was really tricky to follow out there. I couldn’t really stay with Max at the end of the first stint, just chewed up my tyres and then the clean air was nice after the pitstops.
“Great race, we did the parts we needed to right, still need a bit more I think. Max was a little bit too close for our liking, but a great race and a great weekend,” said Piastri.
The standings after Jeddah have painted a new picture for McLaren as well.
It was not too long ago that CEO Zak Brown claimed the world of F1 was entering the “Lando Norris” era, but their ‘second driver’ has since shown him up multiple times.
There’s no telling when last the sport of F1 had such a hotly title fight within one team, let alone the top pack.
Piastri has shown up to the party since day one, and with three wins under his belt this season, Brown should perhaps rethink what “era” of F1 we are entering.
At 99 points on top of the leaderboard, Piastri has earned himself some breathing room, while leaving the frenemies Norris and Verstappen to battle out for second place at 89 and 87 points respectively.