{"id":513626,"date":"2025-10-20T05:35:15","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T05:35:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/513626\/"},"modified":"2025-10-20T05:35:15","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T05:35:15","slug":"max-verstappen-wins-f1-us-grand-prix-cuts-piastri-standings-lead-motorsports-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/513626\/","title":{"rendered":"Max Verstappen wins F1 US Grand Prix; cuts Piastri standings lead | Motorsports News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Verstappen\u2019s wire-to-wire victory in Austin narrows the drivers\u2019 championship gap to 40 points behind Oscar Piastri, with five races remaining.<\/p>\n

Red Bull\u2019s Max Verstappen dominated the US Grand Prix from pole position on Sunday, leading every lap to take another significant chunk out of Oscar Piastri\u2019s Formula One championship lead on a perfect weekend in Texas.<\/p>\n

McLaren\u2019s Piastri finished fifth with his teammate and closest rival, Lando Norris, seconds after passing Ferrari\u2019s Charles Leclerc, last year\u2019s winner, five laps from the chequered flag.<\/p>\n

Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list<\/p>\n

Piastri now leads Britain\u2019s Norris by 14 points, with five rounds and two sprints remaining, while Verstappen has slashed his gap to the Australian to 40 after being 104 behind at the end of August.<\/p>\n

Verstappen also won the Saturday sprint from pole position at Austin\u2019s Circuit of the Americas, while the McLarens collided and retired, on a weekend of maximum points for the four-time world champion.<\/p>\n

McLaren has already sealed the constructors\u2019 title.<\/p>\n

\"OscarChampionship leader Oscar Piastri endured a poor weekend at the US Grand Prix, with the McLaren driver crashing out of Saturday\u2019s Sprint and finishing fifth in Sunday\u2019s main race [Clive Rose\/Getty Images via AFP]Verstappen says the title chance is there<\/p>\n

\u201cFor sure, the chance is there,\u201d\u00a0Verstappen\u00a0said of the title battle. \u201cWe just need to try and deliver these weekends until the end.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will try whatever we can. It\u2019s exciting,\u201d he added after his third win in the last four races and 68th of his career.<\/p>\n

Piastri said he still had full confidence in his ability to become Australia\u2019s first champion since Alan Jones in 1980.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d still rather be where I am than the other two,\u201d added the 24-year-old.<\/p>\n

Norris lost out to Leclerc at the start and then took 21 laps to find a way back past as the\u00a0Monegasque, on the faster but less durable soft tyres,\u00a0held a defensive masterclass.<\/p>\n

Leclerc then battled with Lewis Hamilton, who started on mediums, before pitting on lap 23 and coming back out in ninth place, with his teammate moving up to third and Piastri to fourth.<\/p>\n

Verstappen, by then, was 10 seconds down the road from his closest rival.<\/p>\n

Once the rest of the frontrunners had made their pitstops, Leclerc was again second on the road \u2013 but more than six seconds behind\u00a0Verstappen\u00a0\u2013 with Norris third and having to overtake all over again with a track limits warning hanging over him.<\/p>\n

Job done, Norris pulled away and finished 7.9 seconds behind Verstappen and 7.4 ahead of the Ferrari.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was tough. We did everything we could,\u201d he said of a battle that gave the fans some excitement as\u00a0Verstappen\u00a0completed lap after lap largely absent from the global television feed.<\/p>\n

\u201cI expected a slightly easier second attempt to get through, but it wasn\u2019t the case. Charles drove a very good race. It was good fun, good battles. So we have to take second. Not a lot more we could\u2019ve done today.\u201d<\/p>\n

McLaren team boss Andrea Stella said, however, that Norris could have fought for the win had he not been held up by the Ferrari.<\/p>\n

Hamilton was fourth, with Piastri just 1.1 seconds behind, and George Russell \u2013 the winner last time out in Singapore \u2013 taking the chequered flag in sixth for Mercedes.<\/p>\n

Red Bull\u2019s Yuki Tsunoda finished seventh, ahead of Sauber\u2019s Nico Hulkenberg and Haas\u2019s Oliver Bearman. Fernando Alonso took the final point for Aston Martin.<\/p>\n

The virtual safety car was deployed on lap seven when Mercedes\u2019 Italian rookie Kimi Antonelli and Williams\u2019 Carlos Sainz collided, with the Spaniard retiring after trying to overtake on the inside for seventh place.<\/p>\n

Stewards handed Sainz a\u00a0five-place\u00a0grid penalty at next weekend\u2019s Mexican Grand Prix, plus two penalty points, for causing the collision.<\/p>\n

Sainz\u2019s teammate Alex Albon had also been caught up in a first corner collision with Sauber\u2019s Brazilian rookie Gabriel Bortoleto.<\/p>\n

The weekend was declared a heat hazard, although the air temperature during the race was lower than feared at about 28.6 degrees Celsius (83.5 Fahrenheit).<\/p>\n

\"MaxVerstappen, who trailed Oscar Piastri by as much as 104 points in the drivers\u2019 standings this season, is now at 306 points to Piastri\u2019s 346 after winning the US Grand Prix [John Locher\/Pool via AFP]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Verstappen\u2019s wire-to-wire victory in Austin narrows the drivers\u2019 championship gap to 40 points behind Oscar Piastri, with five…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":513627,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[4979,12,93,49,978,286,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-513626","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-motorsports","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-sport","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-us","13":"tag-us-canada","14":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115404874314091042","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513626\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/513627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}