Could Verstappen have won the F1 Brazil GP from the pitlane?

One year on from winning from 17th on the grid, Max Verstappen delivered another heroic Sao Paulo drive to romp from the pitlane to the Formula 1 podium. But could the world champion have even won it?

Last year, Verstappen received a helping hand from the weather gods to deploy his wet weather skills, opening up different racing lines on the Interlagos track for the Dutchman to scythe through the field.

Making up 16 places in the wet was an outstanding feat, but this year Verstappen did it in the dry. With Red Bull taking his car out of parc ferme to make wholesale set-up changes and install a fresh power unit, the Dutchman started the Brazil GP from the pitlane. 

But even Verstappen’s latest masterclass in Sao Paulo didn’t go without a hitch. Verstappen picked up an early puncture due to debris, pitting under a virtual safety car on lap 6 to force him onto a three-stop strategy.

According to McLaren’s Lando Norris and Andrea Stella, the pace Verstappen displayed to finish 10 seconds behind Norris, meant that from higher up the grid the four-time world champion would have likely defeated them.

«They showed a performance and a pace in the race that meant that without the situation in qualifying, I think Verstappen would have been there for the victory,» Stella said, with similar thoughts from Norris going some way towards explaining why the Briton wasn’t ecstatic about his gap to the Red Bull man ahead of the final triple-header.

Having qualified an unprecedented 16th, Verstappen’s pace sounds hard to explain, but was likely down to Red Bull making the wrong choice on ride heights into qualifying, and then opting for a pitlane start to move its set-up in the other direction.

Bolting on a new engine then provided a nice little straight-line boost to help pass cars into Interlagos’ main overtaking zone at Turn 1, while other cars with less of a pace advantage looked stuck in DRS trains.

The RB21’s pace was such that Verstappen twice emerged ahead of Norris after the championship leader had pitted, leading the race from Norris by 10 seconds with 17 laps to go.

It begs the question whether Verstappen should have pitted a third time for soft tyres at all, or if he should have tried to ride it out and hang on to the lead. Could he have actually won it on two stops?

The real impact of Verstappen’s puncture

Counterintuitively, there’s a case to be made for Verstappen’s early puncture to actually help him — or at least not hurt his race as much as you would expect. Verstappen was one of the few drivers starting on hards — or even using the C2 compound at all — and the few others who used the tyre didn’t go anywhere and tried to get off it at the earliest opportunity.

Alonso’s poor pace on the hard tyre also cautioned McLaren against trying a one-stop with Oscar Piastri to help overcome his 10-second penalty, the Australian instead picking up softs with 32 laps remaining, which locked him into a second stop for mediums later on.

Max Verstappen blitzed the midfield with his heavily changed set-up

Photo by: Mark Thompson / Getty Images

We will never know what Verstappen’s ultimate pace would have been on the white-rimmed tyre, but the VSC gave him an opportunity to get off the unfancied hards and onto the superior mediums rather cheaply. Dropping back to 18th, it was then that Verstappen really flexed his muscles, with two awe-inspiring stints on the medium compound.

But according to Red Bull team boss Laurent Mekies, the argument of his puncture being a blessing in disguise falls apart because his lap six stop all but forced him onto a three-stop strategy.

«In fairness, we were a little bit helped in our disadvantage by the VSC, so it has limited a little bit the loss, but we’ve lost something for sure,» the Frenchman argued. «If you go a few laps longer in the whole sequence — hard, medium — then maybe at that stage you don’t do that final stop.»

As Liam Lawson showed with his 52-lap stint on mediums, making it to the end on a two-stop was certainly not impossible, but the high tyre degradation meant Verstappen would have been hanging on for dear life against Norris and the Mercedes cars, with Norris rapidly catching him at that point.

Instead, going aggressive by bolting on softs gave him an opportunity to go on the offensive and potentially get rewarded for a late safety car. Verstappen also pointed out that by having to pass the number of cars that he did, he wore out the tyres much more than someone like Lawson would have done, who was carefully nursing his rubber to the end.

When asked what would have been possible without the puncture, Verstappen said: «Impossible to know. I don’t know if the hard tyre was going to be a really good tyre. I felt fine on the medium, felt fine on the soft.

Mekies doesn’t think Interlagos was «winnable» for Verstappen

Photo by: Hector Vivas / Getty Images

«Maybe the medium had a bit more grip from what I could see around me. But at the same time, you’re all in dirty air, you’re just sliding around, so it’s impossible to know. But for sure, it’s not ideal. To pit again, be on the medium back in the pack fully, and then have to go all the way through the field — I think that compromised a bit that first stint on the medium.

«I had to pass quite a few cars, you’re overheating tyres constantly, so that was a bit more of a difficult stint towards the end — I would say the last eight, 10 laps. But still, a very strong race for us.»

That’s why Stella thought Red Bull’s three-stop «was the right thing to do», and his counterpart didn’t think a win was possible either if Red Bull had made different strategic decisions. «No, we don’t think it was winnable,» Mekies said. «We would probably never know where we would have finished, but obviously it’s a discussion that the guys had on the pit wall.

«At some stage you need to make the call, and the call was made. I think it gave us a chance to have a very strong go at the podium. Ultimately, we got it. Maybe with one lap more you would get a P2, but I don’t think there was any way you could have kept P1 if you just looked at the tyre degradation and where we were.»

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— The Autosport.com Team