Can Max Verstappen Win the Driver’s Championship This Year?

Max Verstappen has had an incredible run these past few races, pushing the limits and winning first place in the 2025 Monaco and Baku Grand Prix. So as a delusional Formula 1 fan and a lover of all things math and statistics, I took it upon myself to calculate the odds that one of the best drivers of our time can steal the Driver’s Championship from under McLaren’s noses. 

Photo by Clive Rose/Getty Images

A minor disclaimer: my math is not completely accurate, so don’t take my analysis and calculations too seriously. I'm also in no means an expert on Formula 1 or formal statistics. This is all just for fun (and an excuse for me to validate my personal theories). 

Photo: AP Photo/Vincent Thian

The first thing to consider is the car. After summer break, Oracle Red Bull Racing has come back with a faster car that almost gives McLaren’s rocket ship a run for its money. The team upgraded the car’s floor and increased the efficiency of their wings. Although I don’t know a lot about the engineering specifics, I think that all of these minor improvements are making a big impact on the car’s overall performance. Historically, Red Bull’s car is known to do well on tracks with higher downforce (i.e more corners), like Monaco. With that in mind, the main races like Mexico and Qatar are promising opportunities for Verstappen to gain more points. 

The current standing has Oscar Piastri at 336 points, Lando Norris at 314 points, and Max Verstappen at 273 points. This holds Piastri 63 points ahead of Verstappen. If we maximize the number of points Verstappen gains for the last few races and sprints  (as in we assume he wins all of them), Max has the opportunity to gain 174 points. However, this calculation does not take Piastri and Norris' performances into account.

Given the unlikely hypothetical that Verstappen wins the rest of the races and sprints, he has the potential to finish with 447 points. With Piastri’s current 336 points, he must score less than 110 additional points for Verstappen to overtake him. So as much as a perfect winning streak would help his score, Verstappen’s success also rides on Piastri’s performance. 

Photo: Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images (Let's hope Oscar recreates Baku lap 1 six more times...)

But we obviously know that it’s nearly impossible for a driver to win six consecutive races, especially with phenomenal competitors. There are a number of issues that can arise, like slow pit stops and DNFs. All of these are extremely hard to include in our calculations, especially without concrete data or numbers. 

As a data scientist, I couldn’t help but run some code on the scenario. I used Python to program a basic Monte-Carlo simulation (which is kind of funny, considering the Monza Grand Prix is in Monte Carlo… haha...). For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, think of Doctor Strange in Avengers: Infinity War. Essentially, I ran 30,000 possible ‘futures’ and used that information to generalize an overall percentage chance of Verstappen winning the 2025 Driver’s Championship.

For the simulation, I had to make many assumptions for probabilities. As I mentioned, different cars perform better on certain tracks, so with that in mind I used a grading system (high, medium, low downforce) to weight the performance probabilities for each team’s car (ex: High = 0.9 for McLaren, 1.3 for Red Bull, Low = 1.1 for McLaren, 0.85 for Red Bull). I also gave a base probability for each driver to win any given race (30% Piastri, 25% Norris, 20% Verstappen, and so on). Finally, I also used random Gamma noise and a 5% DNF probability to account for unforeseeable issues. A headache, I know. But I truly love what I do and thoroughly enjoyed messing around with the numbers to simulate different possible season outcomes. 

Also note that there are many factors I wasn't able to take into account, like fastest lap points and qualifying positions. That added data would increase the accuracy of the simulation, but I didn't want to speculate too much.

The results were not as comforting as I had hoped. I was looking forward to an optimistic percentage to use as evidence when arguing with other, more realistic Formula 1 fans. But the results were ultimately a lot worse than I expected. The simulations I ran returned a very sad 0.15% chance that Max Verstappen wins the Driver’s Championship for the 2025 season. All of that work just to be reality checked with cold, hard numbers. 

Histogram of Verstappen’s final points vs. the leader. X = points difference (negative = Verstappen behind, positive = ahead). Y = number of simulations with that outcome

Needless to say, the odds are less than slim, but wouldn’t it be absolutely earth shattering if Verstappen can somehow make a comeback? In the words of George Russell himself, the chances of Max Verstappen winning this season are “one hundred percent” (he actually said this on Thursday). I say let’s stick with that probability instead.