'Champion's weekend from flawless Norris but Verstappen shines brightest'

Lando Norris was asked after the Sao Paulo Grand Prix whether he was now thinking about the championship, having extended his lead in one weekend from one point to nearly a clear win.

"Not at all," he said.

Even if that's true, even if that's what he's trying to do, he can't not be, deep down.

The Briton's second victory in succession moves him 24 points clear of his McLaren team-mate Oscar Piastri. Max Verstappen - despite producing at Interlagos probably the drive of the season - is 49 adrift.

There is a maximum of 83 points available over the remaining three races. It is not won yet, but Norris is in total control of the championship heading to the next race in Las Vegas from 20-22 November.

Between Norris and Piastri, the season has flipped on its head in the space of just seven races spanning a little over two months.

Piastri left the Dutch Grand Prix at the end of August, the first race after F1's summer break, with a 34-point lead, after his seventh victory of the season and Norris' retirement.

The Australian looked an odds-on title favourite at that point. He had been solidity personified since the start of the year, and unquestionably the leading McLaren driver to that point of the season.

But Piastri's season has simply fallen apart, and Norris has got better and better.

Over those seven grands prix, including two sprints, the swing in Norris' favour has been a remarkable 58 points.

Piastri's pace has disappeared - even if there were flashes over the weekend in Brazil that suggested it might be coming back - and Norris has shed the inconsistency and small errors that blighted his first part of the season, and begun to look very much like a champion in the making.

Brazil was a champion's weekend from Norris. Flawless, he took pole and the victory in both the sprint and the grand prix, and never looked like doing anything else.

So his remarks after the race have to be seen for what they are - the sort of thing every sportsperson says when they know what's possible, but they also know that the best way to achieve it is to ignore the ambition, and think only of the method of getting them to it.

"It's a great win," Norris said, "but to be honest, seeing how quick Max was today, I'm pretty disappointed we weren't quicker. So that's where my mind is at the minute - probably going to see the team, congratulate them and see where we weren't quick enough.

"But that's me. And we'll see what we can do. Obviously, not a long way to go, but it can change so quickly, like we've seen today already. So just focus on myself, keep my head down, ignore everyone and keep pushing."

One statistic stands out from this weekend for Norris. This was his seventh win of the season, in the 21st grand prix. That it has taken him this long to equal the victory tally Piastri had after 15 says a lot about how the season has changed.

On Saturday, after sprint victory moved him into a nine-point championship lead, Norris spoke of having lessened his weaknesses.

He was unquestionably the leading McLaren driver last year, but struggled with the car in the first part of the season. Intense, focused work from driver and team on making him more comfortable slowly began to pay off through the summer and into the autumn, and now he is living up to the status with which he started the season - favourite - but lost in those difficult early races.

"I care a lot about people's perspectives and how I'm portrayed and things in the media," he said on Sunday. "I probably cared too much. Even at the beginning of the year, I think I cared too much, and probably it was affecting me in not the best ways.

"I've just learned to deal with those things better. Not by not caring, because I still always want to have a good impression. I never want to be rude or do those things.

"But I'll always try and make my point and say what I believe in. That's one of the things I've learned the most: just to be true to yourself, have confidence in yourself, believe in yourself, and speak your mind."

For his team-mate, Sao Paulo was the latest in a series of chastening experiences.

Piastri's crash out of third place in the sprint race not only handed Norris the championship lead on a plate, but was also his sixth significant error in five grands prix, to add to the three crashes and a jumped start he had in Baku in September, and his responsibility for the crash at the start of the sprint in Austin that took out both McLaren drivers.

Looking to make amends in the grand prix, he made a bold passing move on Mercedes' Kimi Antonelli and Ferrari's Charles Leclerc into Turn One at the restart after an early safety car. It ended with a collision with Antonelli, which bounced the Italian into Leclerc, whose car was terminally damaged.

Many - including Leclerc - felt Antonelli bore at least some responsibility for the incident.

Piastri had been fully alongside approaching the corner, but had to brake earlier on the inside line. He had a lock-up, but was under control and at the apex when Antonelli turned in.

Leclerc said: "Oscar was optimistic, but Kimi knew that Oscar was on the inside, I think, and he kind of did the corner like Oscar was never there. For me, the blame is not all on Oscar." Piastri felt the same.

But the stewards disagreed, put the blame entirely on Piastri, and he was hit with a 10-second penalty, from which he recovered to finish fifth.

"The decision today I'm already pretty at peace with," he said. "It kind of is what it is."

As for the championship, Piastri says he is more concerned about his general performance levels. Brazil was better than Mexico, where he was badly off the pace. But he still never looked a threat to Norris.

"Just try and get the most out of (the rest of the season) as I can," he said. "The penalty was one thing but I don't think the pace was at a level I wanted it to be.

"I'm just trying to get on top of things with that and try and have the best weekends we can."

If the championship had not taken such a decisive turn, the person in the spotlight after Brazil would have been Verstappen. Even in the circumstances, the Dutchman shone brightest of all, with one of the performances of his career.

A year ago at this race, Verstappen put himself on the brink of a fourth world title with a quite brilliant comeback drive from 17th on the grid to win.

It was one of the all-time great drives, but it was in the wet, when these sorts of things are more possible.

On Sunday, in a dry race, Verstappen finished third after starting from the pit lane. Right on the gearbox of Antonelli's Mercedes, the car in second.

And he did it despite a puncture on the sixth lap that forced an early pit stop that dropped him from the 13th place he had by then recovered to, right to the back.

"Incredible," was the word Verstappen used to describe it. "He did an amazing job," said Antonelli. "Sensational," added Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies.

What was all the more remarkable was that Red Bull had lacked pace all weekend. Verstappen finished the sprint fourth, complaining of a lack of grip. It would have been fifth had it not been for Piastri's crash.

And for the grand prix, Verstappen qualified only 16th, the first time in his entire career he had been knocked out in the first part of qualifying on pace.

Realising changes they had made to the car for qualifying had gone the wrong way, Red Bull chose to modify the set-up for the race. They stuck with the decision to abandon the new floor introduced in Mexico, but made a bunch of other tweaks, including fitting a new engine.

This breaks the rules that say teams cannot change the car's set-up once qualifying has started; hence the pit lane start.

In a way, although the puncture put him to the back again after he had made up six places over the three racing laps that had been possible up to that point in between a real safety car and a virtual one, it did him a favour in that it got him off the hard tyre and on to the favoured medium.

Once the race was properly under way, he began to pick his way through the field, to the extent that by the time Norris made his final stop on lap 54, with 17 to go, the person who inherited the lead was Verstappen.

"Not bad," he said over the radio when his engineer Gianpiero Lambiase informed him of this.

It looked like he might stay out - and try to defend the lead - and in fact some rival engineers believe he should have done. That he could even have won had Red Bull committed early to two stints on the medium from that first stop and Verstappen managed his tyres accordingly.

But Mekies disagreed, saying: "I don't think there was any way we could have got the P1 if you just look at it."

And so did McLaren team principal Andrea Stella: "The level of degradation was very high, and at some stage I think the tyres just ran out of rubber," he said.

"I think they knew at Red Bull that it would have been quite a significant gamble to go to the end with the same set, and considering the fact that they had a new soft to put on, I think that was the right thing to do."

The question is entertaining, on an academic level, but also largely immaterial, and should not detract from the scale of Verstappen's achievement.

The prize was not as glittering, so the drive probably won't get the same attention, but as Mekies pointed out: "It was as sensational as last year to bring it to P3 from the pit lane on a dry, relatively uneventful race."

As for the championship, Verstappen needs some kind of a miracle now that he is 49 points adrift with such a short run to the end of the season.

"We didn't lose the championship here or whatever," he said. "We lost the championship from race one 'til Zandvoort. We had a lot of weekends where we simply were not quick enough. Then, of course, you have a big gap. Then we had good moments where you get some points back, but not enough. That's how the season goes.

"Over the whole season, we haven't been good enough, but we will try everything we can until the end of the season to score some highlights and try to win some races. That's why we are here today."