Verstappen opens up on 2025 title‑fight mind games with Norris and rivals

Under the Yas Marina floodlights, with the smell of hot brakes still hanging over parc fermé, Max Verstappen looked every inch the victor and yet, for the first time since 2021, not the world champion. Now, with the dust settled on a 24-race epic, the Dutchman has pulled back the visor on the mind games that ran alongside his fight with Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri.

For most of the year, the psychological narrative around 2025 was that McLaren were learning on the job while Verstappen was the old master. He even tried to play that idea down on the eve of Abu Dhabi. As Motor Sport Magazine reported, he shrugged in the title-decider press conference:

"Trophy looks the same. I’ve already achieved everything that I wanted to achieve in F1, and everything is just a bonus."

— Max Verstappen, speaking in Abu Dhabi, via Motor Sport Magazine

But behind the cool delivery there was calculation. In October, he had publicly insisted he no longer needed to play mental games like he did in his bruising 2021 duel with Lewis Hamilton. Yet speaking to Viaplay after losing the crown to Norris, Verstappen admitted to OneStopStrategy and F1-Fansite that the games never really stopped.

"That’s in me automatically. I’m doing that a bit for fun too. Those are just things you say, because you know it’s being written down everywhere. I don’t care if I say it or not. I like it sometimes, because then you get a counter-reaction. That’s part of it too."

— Max Verstappen, speaking to Viaplay, quoted by OneStopStrategy/F1-Fansite

One of those barbs came when he suggested he would have wrapped the title up months earlier if he had been driving a McLaren. As he now concedes, that was less frustration and more a deliberate nudge at Norris and Piastri, forcing them to read their own names in his quotes in the middle of an already suffocating title battle.

The context matters. After the Dutch Grand Prix, Verstappen left his home race 104 points behind Oscar Piastri. As Motorsport.com’s piece for Yahoo Sports recounted, he admitted that when he got home after Zandvoort he thought, “we’re checked out of the championship”. Then Red Bull found a rich vein of form, the RB21 upgrades bit, and he stormed back into contention with a run of wins that had McLaren’s orange cars seeing navy blue in their mirrors in almost every pit window.

Crucially, Verstappen’s mental approach hardened rather than frayed. Asked by Formule1.nl about the pressure of that comeback, he told RacingNews365:

"Not everyone handles pressure equally well; it has to be innate. A lot of things can be learned, but some things really have to be ingrained in you, personality-wise, and you can’t completely teach those."

— Max Verstappen, speaking to Formule1.nl, via RacingNews365

From a young age, he added, the message from home was simple: don’t complain, just go for it. That steel showed up again before the final two rounds. As Yahoo’s report from Qatar highlighted, he insisted he would approach the run-in the same way whether leading or chasing, saying he was “here to win” but “not too stressed” and that he wouldn’t be “crying in Abu Dhabi” if the number one disappeared from his car.

Across the garage divide, Norris built a very different mental armour. PlanetF1 revealed that mid-season he turned to a psychologist to help manage distractions and self-criticism as Verstappen’s late charge gathered momentum. The Briton admitted the sessions “played a part” in his eventual success and, tellingly, he said:

"I won without it, which is, for sure, one of the coolest parts of it, and I won it without having to be like that."

— Lando Norris, speaking to Sky Sports News, via PlanetF1

Where Verstappen weaponised experience and a few pointed jabs, Norris and Piastri leaned on emotional intelligence. ESPN’s deep dive into Piastri’s season painted the Australian as almost unnervingly stoic, giving flat, controlled “no” answers when invited to criticise Norris or McLaren, a conscious effort to cut out the noise that so often fuels a title rival’s mind games.

On track in Abu Dhabi, those psychological threads intertwined. As Sky Sports’ Martin Brundle detailed, McLaren put Piastri on hard tyres and gave him licence to attack Verstappen early, partly to stop the Red Bull from backing the pack into Norris and a DRS train of hungry Ferraris and Mercedes. Red Bull, meanwhile, ran Yuki Tsunoda long, knowing Norris would have to pass him late on, radioing the Japanese driver in a way Brundle described as “bordering on menacing”. It was strategy, yes, but also theatre – forcing Norris to take one more high-risk decision with the title on the line, diving down the inside through the dirty air.

In the end, Verstappen dominated the race but lost the war by two points. Norris soaked up the pressure for third, his work with a psychologist and McLaren’s strategic clarity allowing him to resist both the undercut threats on track and the psychological undercut coming from the other side of the paddock.

And yet, even in defeat, Verstappen kept the upper hand in how the story would be remembered. Speaking to Sky Sports, as relayed by F1 Oversteer, he was generous in public, saying he did not “even see it like losing”, praising Norris for a “very good season” and calling a first title “super emotional” and “very special”. The message to his rival was clear: enjoy your moment, I’ll be back.

The 2025 fight will be remembered for daring passes, botched calls and DRS trains stretching to the horizon, but its defining feature may be what happened between the white lines in the drivers’ heads. Verstappen has made peace with the fact that mind games are “part of it”, even “for fun”. Norris has proved you can beat him by tending to the mind as carefully as the car. When the lights go out in 2026, the next chapter of their rivalry will be written as much in sports psychologists’ offices and press rooms as in the braking zones of Turn 1.