The Japan Times - Verstappen's late-season surge faces steamy Singapore examination

Back-to-back wins in Monza and Baku have left third-placed Verstappen 69 points behind championship leader Oscar Piastri with seven grands prix and three sprints remaining.

Lando Norris sits between the two, 25 points, or one race win, behind his McLaren teammate Piastri and 44 ahead of Verstappen.

Dutchman Verstappen is not getting carried away by the growing talk of a fifth consecutive world title, especially because Red Bull have a poor recent record under the lights in Singapore.

Verstappen has 67 GP wins but he has never taken the chequered flag at the bumpy Marina Bay Street Circuit, where extremes of heat, humidity and weather all play a part in a physically demanding examination.

Drivers can shed up to three kilos (more than six pounds) during the longest outing on the calendar, where completing the 62 laps often lasts the maximum two hours race time allowed.

"Basically everything needs to go perfect from my side and then a bit of luck from their side," said Verstappen when asked of his prospects of further closing the gap to the two McLarens in Singapore on Sunday.

A floor upgrade brought in for Monza coupled with Verstappen finally working out how to get the best from the twitchy 2025 Red Bull led him to call the last two results "amazing".

Red Bull veteran adviser Helmut Marko said the "hope has been revived" after Baku, which proved "Monza was not a one-off".

- 'Bloody hot' -

But Marko knows the team traditionally struggle with the high downforce set-up required for a Singapore circuit where qualifying is all-important and overtaking near-impossible.

Two years ago Singapore was the only race that Red Bull failed to win in a dominant season and the only weekend where Verstappen did not make the podium.

"It's not only high downforce, it's bloody hot always there, which our car also doesn't seem to like so much," Marko told Austrian TV.

"So it will be the real benchmark of where we are."

Piastri's crash in Baku and Norris's lacklustre seventh place means McLaren still need 13 points in Singapore to be assured of the constructors' championship for the second year running.

While that seems a formality, McLaren chief executive Zak Brown admitted Verstappen was becoming "a disrupter" in Norris and Piastri's fight for the drivers' title.

"I think you've got to pay attention to Max," Brown told Bloomberg.

"We've got to keep doing what we're doing. The constructors' (title) is looking very good, hopefully, we can get the job done in Singapore."

Brown said there would be no McLaren team orders for Piastri and Norris between now and the end of the season.

"What we want to do is we want our two drivers and Max -- but we'd like to kind of get him out of there -- to fight for the championship... and may the best man win."

M.Matsumoto--JT