If a week is considered a long time in politics, then 24 hours can certainly be a long time in Formula 1.

It was after qualifying at the last race in Baku during his regular Saturday night briefing with the written media that McLaren team principal Andrea Stella offered an opinion which had appeared to border on uncharacteristic exaggeration.

“Pole position in Monza, victory, pole position here, Red Bull are a very serious contender to win races and a very serious contender for the Drivers’ Championship,” Stella warned.

“A firm YES [Verstappen is still a contender]. Can you write it in capitals? Because it was quoted in capitals.”

Verstappen had indeed returned to winning ways the fortnight before in Italy, ahead of Stella’s two title-chasing drivers, and here he was on pole again in Baku after a qualifying session in which championship leader Oscar Piastri had crashed and team-mate Lando Norris underwhelmed to leave the McLaren pair ninth and seventh on the grid, respectively.

Verstappen was expected to win again from the front of a mixed-up grid but the McLarens were still strongly tipped to make their way back up the order – most likely to the podium – to greatly limit any inroads their Red Bull rival was going to make into his pre-race championship deficit of 94 points to Piastri.

Expect, if course, it didn’t play out quite like that.

Verstappen duly did win from pole – at a canter – but he unexpectedly took the full 25 points gained for the victory out of Piastri’s lead after the title leader crashed out again, while Norris finished where he qualified in seventh after surprisingly failing to make any lasting progress through the field.

It meant that Verstappen’s title race deficit reduced to 69 points, making Stella’s Saturday claim suddenly appear not quite so outlandish.

“I said YES in capital letters when asked if Max was in the championship,” Stella said when speaking to the same journalists after the race.

“Sunday confirmed that. We are talking about Max Verstappen, we are talking about Red Bull.”

So does Verstappen think he’s back in the hunt?

The irony, of course, was that it had been Verstappen himself who had sounded the earliest death-knell on his title defence much earlier in the year.

It was ahead of Spanish Grand Prix in June, at a point in the season when he was still only 25 points behind Piastri, that Verstappen said that his challenge to the pacesetting McLarens “doesn’t really feel like a fight”.

That turned into an even more concrete “we are way too slow to fight for the title” at the end of that Barcelona weekend once his deficit had almost doubled to 49 points after a race in which he had eventually been classified 10th in the wake of 10-second penalty for colliding into Mercedes’ George Russell.

The next race in Canada aside, when Verstappen finished second to Russell, subsequent results bore the Dutchman’s title persimmon out.

Finishes of DNF, fifth, fourth and ninth took Red Bull – who changed team principal after July’s British Grand Prix with Christian Horner replaced by Laurent Mekies – and their world champion into the summer break on a low note.

And although Verstappen returned to the podium when the season resumed on home soil in Zandvoort, a seventh win of the year for Piastri meant Red Bull’s number one was now 104 points off the pace.

It seemed to be firmly game over.

But then came what McLaren’s Stella believes was key ahead of Monza – the introduction a new floor into Red Bull’s RB21 – and Verstappen, driving brilliantly with a very skinny rear wing and a front end to his liking, has since gone back-to-back with emphatic wins in the low-downforce conditions of Italy and Azerbaijan.

And although not particularly talking his title prospects up post-race in Baku given the scale of turnaround still required, Verstappen noticeably wasn’t completely writing them off either.

“Seven races to go and it’s still 69 points, it’s a lot,” Verstappen told Sky Sports F1.

“Basically, everything needs to go perfect from my side and then a bit of luck from their side I need as well. So it’s still very tough.”

He then added in the post-race press conference: “I don’t rely on hope.”

Why Singapore will be a key test of Red Bull’s revival

Instead of relying on “hope”, the ever-pragmatic Verstappen will instead look to see whether the RB21’s improved form translates to other types of circuit – starting in Singapore this weekend.

While the Marina Bay venue is another street track, it bares far closer resemblance to slow-speed Monaco – where Verstappen finished fourth back in May – than it does Baku, which features one of the fastest and longest straights of the season.

Singapore is also the only track on the current calendar that Verstappen has never won at, with Red Bull only victorious once there (with Sergio Perez in 2022) on F1’s last nine visits.

“It’s completely different,” said Verstappen of the 19-corner wall-lined layout for a race that runs under floodlights in the evening.

“High downforce. A lot of deg on the tyres, so we’ll see what happens. I really don’t know at the moment.”

Team boss Mekies was also playing things cautiously given Red Bull struggled badly the last time F1 raced in high-downforce conditions. That was just before the summer break in Hungary when Verstappen finished 72 seconds behind the McLarens on the way to an uncharacterised ninth-place finish.

“There are only slow speed corners in Baku. It’s very low downforce and it worked very well for us, which is a different equations to Monza. So that’s the good news,” said Mekies. “The common point is very low downforce.

“You go to Singapore, you keep the slow-speed corners, but you go to maximum downforce where we have been struggling quite a lot in Budapest, and before Budapest.

“Also it’s a much hotter track compared to Baku and we know how sensitive, not only us, but the whole field, is to this aspect.

“So we take it step by step. We take the challenge of Singapore. It’s a track that’s been challenging for the team for many, many years.”

McLaren, in turn, are expecting to be back on more familiar 2025 form after what they will hope was an aberration last time out.

“We knew that Baku for us would have been a difficult circuit So we will see now in Singapore, which should be more of one in which we should perform well,” predicted Stella.

“Hopefully, we can go back to fighting for victories and then we will see how the rest of the championship will unfold.”

Singapore may well prove a litmus test for how the final 10 weeks of the season play out.

Should McLaren repeat Norris’ dominant Singapore victory over Verstappen from last year and get back to winning ways, then the spectre of a late-season challenge from Red Bull’s number one will have certainly lessened given the MCL39 will inevitably be strong on tracks coming up with medium and high-speed corners too, such as the Circuit of the Americas.

However, a third win in a row for Verstappen – and/or fresh setbacks for either or both of McLaren’s drivers – may have the alarm bells ringing at Woking once post-race celebrations for what is almost-certain to be the winning of their second successive Constructors’ Championship on Sunday night start to die down.

Verstappen’s task would still be an almighty tall one – as it stands, the mathematics show he has to outscore Piastri by an average of 10 points and Norris by just over an average of six points over the final seven weekends to win the title by a solitary point – but even his consistent presence back at the front of the field could cause headaches for one or both of McLaren’s drivers in their own title aspirations.

And as Mercedes boss Toto Wolff, singing from a very similar hymn sheet to Stella, warned after Baku: “Max Verstappen you always need to be wary of what he can achieve, especially if he’s seeing that it’s actually back on the cards.”

The 2025 Formula 1 title fight continues under the lights at the Singapore Grand Prix this week, live on Sky Sports F1. Stream Sky Sports with NOW – no contract, cancel anytime