Max Verstappen Is Splitting Ferrari in the Standings After Singapore. Can He Split Mercedes Next?

Max Verstappen won the Singapore Grand Prix on Sunday by 7.3 seconds over Charles Leclerc, finally claiming the Grand Prix victory that had eluded him at Marina Bay. It was his second consecutive Grand Prix win, following his breakthrough at the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia on October 4, and it came a day after he won Saturday's Singapore Sprint. Three wins across two weekends is a sharp turn for a driver who had gone the first sixteen rounds of the season without a single Grand Prix win. It has also put him back inside the championship fight, specifically between the two Ferrari drivers he just passed.

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What Changed

Before Sunday, Verstappen sat fifth in the drivers' championship on 196 points, one behind Leclerc's 197. His Grand Prix win in Singapore added 25 points and moved him past Leclerc into fourth, a swing that also cost Ferrari ground since Leclerc's own second-place finish was worth 18. The standings now read Lewis Hamilton third on 229, Verstappen fourth on 221, and Leclerc fifth on 215. Verstappen is sitting between Ferrari's two drivers in the championship table, adding another complication to a partnership that has already faced questions this season about team orders and how best to maximize points for the team. Hamilton was the one who raised the issue publicly in September, asking for clearer rules of engagement rather than preferential treatment.

George Russell is next up, in second place on 238 points. A 17-point gap is small enough to disappear in a single weekend if Verstappen wins and Russell has a poor result, though holding that advantage over six races is a different matter. Kimi Antonelli, Russell's teammate, still leads the championship by a wide margin on 340 points, 102 ahead of Russell and 119 ahead of Verstappen, a cushion built over a season in which Verstappen did not win a single Grand Prix until Malaysia.

Why It Matters

Six Grand Prix weekends remain this season, at the Circuit of the Americas, Mexico City, Brazil's Interlagos, Las Vegas, Qatar and Abu Dhabi. Singapore was the final Sprint weekend of the year, and Formula 1 dropped the fastest-lap bonus point starting in 2025, so each remaining race is worth a maximum of 25 points, with 150 left on the table through the end of the championship.

Catching Antonelli is the harder question. A 119-point deficit with 150 points left is not mathematically dead, but closing it would need Verstappen to win almost everything that remains while Antonelli's results fall apart, the kind of scenario that holds up on a spreadsheet more than on a grid. Antonelli's championship lead was already extending before Singapore, and his fourth-place finish in Saturday's Sprint and third in Sunday's Grand Prix stretched it further even as Verstappen won both.

What to Watch Next

The more realistic story over the next six races is whether Verstappen turns a 17-point gap on Russell into an actual swap in position. Ferrari's two drivers face a different version of the same problem now that a Red Bull sits between them: Hamilton has to defend third against a resurgent Verstappen, while Leclerc has to find a way back past him, two distinct jobs rather than one shared incentive.

The Circuit of the Americas, October 23 to 25, is the first real test of whether the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia and Singapore were a genuine turnaround for Red Bull or a two-race peak on tracks that happened to suit the car. Either answer will say more about the rest of the season than this weekend alone can.

The Pulse24 Take

A week ago, Verstappen was still looking for his first Grand Prix win of the season. Now he has won two Grands Prix in a row, added a Singapore Sprint victory, and moved into fourth in the standings, splitting the two Ferraris along the way. Antonelli remains far out in front, and nothing in this stretch changes that. But the fight for second has become a lot more interesting, and with Russell only 17 points away, the more useful question for the season's final six races is not whether Verstappen catches the championship leader. It is how far he climbs before time runs out.