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Formula One’s world championship is going down to the wire, with McLaren duo Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri and Red Bull’s Max Verstappen set to square off in a three-way title fight

Lusail, Qatar

Max Verstappen was in a taunting mood.

The four-time Formula One world champion had no business being in the hunt to make it five. By all rights, he should have been out of contention weeks ago. But there he was, ready to race in the desert, within striking distance of his two McLaren rivals—and Verstappen wanted to remind them why.

“We are in this fight, still,” he said over the weekend, “because of other people’s failures.”

Sure enough, during Sunday’s Grand Prix here, those people failed again in spectacular fashion. Another McLaren debacle, which turned on a strategic blunder early in the race, opened the door for Verstappen to take his fifth victory in the past nine outings. The result under the lights and the fireworks of Qatar meant that this year’s world championship is heading for a three-man showdown at the final race of the season on Dec. 7 in Abu Dhabi.

As things stand, McLaren’s British driver Lando Norris sits in first place with 408 points. Verstappen, of Red Bull, is lurking behind him with 396, while Norris’s Australian teammate, Oscar Piastri, now sits on 392. (Formula One awards 25 for a victory, 18 for second, 15 for third, and continues all the way to 10th place.)

The scenario is clear: If Verstappen can win on Sunday and Norris finishes off the podium, the Dutchman will take his fifth consecutive title and cement his place among the greatest F1 drivers of all time. He would also condemn McLaren to one of the biggest chokes in the history of the sport.

“Well,” Verstappen said after taking the checkered flag, “it’s all possible now.”

Back in August, after the Dutch Grand Prix, Verstappen seemed more likely to trade in his car for a bicycle than to contend for the world championship. He was 104 points off the lead. His team leadership was emerging from turmoil. And Verstappen himself was prepared to write off the season.

Only one race at a time, he began to claw his way back. He won at Monza, then in Baku. He finished second in Singapore, then scooped up another first place in Austin, Tex. There was no doubt that his Red Bull wasn’t as quick as the otherwise dominant McLaren, but McLaren’s was facing an issue more tactical than mechanical. The car was so fast for so much of the season that the stiffest competition its drivers faced was from each other.

Many teams in that spot would simply have picked one of them to be their No. 1 and focused their resources on delivering him to the title. Instead, McLaren devised what it called the Papaya Rules: Norris and Piastri were free to race each other and the road would decide which one would win his first F1 championship.

The problem with that approach was that neither one put enough daylight behind him. Norris and Piastri chipped away at each other, while the enemy in the Red Bull kept making strides. Watching them from afar, Verstappen could only scoff at the Papaya Rules. If he’d been driving a McLaren, he said last week, “We wouldn’t be talking about a championship. It would already have been won, easily.”

The comeback truly began to materialize last month in Las Vegas when both McLarens were disqualified for a technical infringement, leaving Verstappen to close the gap by 25 points with his Sin City victory. The footsteps were growing louder. Verstappen was like the creature in the monster movie who was never quite dead—in fact, McLaren CEO Zak Brown said as much.

But if that was the case, then McLaren was the hopeless character who forgot to bolt the back door.

Nothing made that clearer than the team’s tactics in Qatar over the weekend. When an innocuous battle for ninth place led to a crash and the emergence of the safety car after Lap 7, most teams on track made the wise call to pit for a fresh set of tires. McLaren, betting on a different strategy, chose not to.

It didn’t take long for the engineers on the pit wall to realize that they had handed Verstappen a huge advantage. If he played his cards right, he would only need to make one more stop in the remaining 50 laps. The McLarens would require two.

“We made the wrong decision,” said Norris, who had already been passed by Verstappen in the first corner of the race. “That was clear as soon as it happened.”

Norris finished fourth. Piastri, who had started in pole position, came second. Both were disconsolate on Sunday night. Verstappen was flirting with the most stunning comeback since Lewis Hamilton reeled in Felipe Massa in 2008, and the McLarens clearly understood that it could have been prevented.

“I haven’t spoken to anyone but I feel pretty crap as you can imagine,” Piastri said. “I don’t know what to say.”