After a season in which he almost overcame a 104 point deficit to claim a record-tying fifth consecutive F1 world title, you’d expect Max Verstappen to have quite a few highlights in 2025. However, his personal highlight was off the track, rather than on it, he revealed when talking to ViaPlay.
Birth of daughter Lily Verstappen’s highlight
Despite finishing just 2 points behind eventual world champion Lando Norris, Verstappen admitted his personal highlight was the birth of his daughter Lily. Looking back to the on-track action, Verstappen named his win in Japan was one of the highlights of 2025.
“The end…,” Verstappen joked when asked about his 2025 F1 highlights. “Highlight… No, I don’t think there’s a single – we’re talking about racing right?
“The highlight is of course the birth of my daughter. But on track, a couple of highlights.
“I think the win in Japan. I thought that one was important, especially with Honda and what they meant for me.
“It was great, especially at that point. We didn’t feel like we could compete with McLaren, so to win that one was great.”
Following that victory only a win in Imola was recorded, and a long drought followed.
“The next one took quite long in my opinion, which is Monza. We won there after those many difficult weeks, where after the races we had lots of meetings which we started quite disappointed.
“That was kind of the turnaround to better results until the end.”
Set-up woes causing difficult F1 season
The aforementioned drought in victories and even podium places, meant the Dutchman together with his engineer Giampiero Lambiase (GP) tried everything in the book to get the RB21 to work. And at sometime
“Most of [the turnaround] was because of the set-up of the car. And also calculations that we didn’t think were possible with the car, where the performance was.
“So eventually we got the performance out. And it was also something we couldn’t see in the wind tunnel, I think.
When asked whether his feedback was the deciding factor in turning the form around, the 71-time Grand Prix winner was honest it was a long shot.
“We tried literally everything with the car,” Verstappen explained. “If you were to ask GP what we tried… It’s bizarre how we sometimes overhauled the car from FP1 to quali.
“But that one set-up, that one philosophy -of which [the engineers] always said we’d lose so much downforce, it’d be impossible- eventually in Zandvoort during qualifying we just said: ‘let’s just try it, it doesn’t work at the moment anyway.'”
