We beat Max Verstappen at Baku in five different ways in F1 25. Here's how

What a difference one race makes. The 2025 F1 season has been a consistent show of dominance from McLaren, tarnished only slightly by Lando Norris’ hesitant race starts and some excessive politeness from both drivers and strategists in how the cars should be ordered. Still, even after the ‘No, please, after you’ shenanigans of Monza, it looked like a foregone conclusion that one of the papaya pals would be lifting the driver’s championship trophy at the end of the season.

Until Baku, where Max Verstappen not only won the race, but did so seemingly on raw pace. Suddenly, your YouTube algorithm is awash with videos insisting that Verstappen can absolutely still win this year’s championship.

We could have sat back, allowed our thumbs to scroll us into a stupor of high-energy thinkpieces and thought little more about it. But instead, we decided to find out exactly how hard it is to beat Max at Baku in a McLaren.

Our findings? It’s not only doable, it’s doable in five different ways.

1. Taking Verstappen’s 2018 braking line into turn one

You’ll remember the days when Ricciardo and Verstappen were team-mates. The days before Red Bull’s second seat was widely regarded as cursed, because the Honey Badger often managed to beat him in equal machinery. However, he also often found himself listening to carbon shattering all around his helmet as the two got a bit too close and sent each other off into the Armco.

One of the more spectacular instances happened, by coincidence, during the 2018 grand prix of Azerbaijan. Ricciardo, tucked up behind his young Dutch pal and with DRS activated as they hared down the preposterously long main straight, dummied a move one way as they headed into the turn one braking zone, then cut back to pass on the inside.

Max, preferring not to be overtaken on this occasion, covered the move and moments later the two had collided, ending in a double retirement.

Fast forward to lap three of TG’s 2025 Azerbaijan grand prix in EA’s F1 25. We could debate who was at fault for that incident until Ferrari gets a pit stop right, but the salient fact is this: it stopped the chasing driver from getting past.

Driving Piastri’s McLaren in P1, we’re providing a nice little tow for Verstappen in P2 and with DRS enabled, he’s close enough to launch a move into the braking zone. Except this is a videogame, where whiplash is on the ‘to be added’ list of development priorities and pressing the d-pad downwards gives you an incredibly generous view of what’s happening behind you.

We weave like Rumplestiltskin hopped up on Red Bull. Max has no time or space to adjust his line. It takes a lot of judicious use of the rewind button (aka the best invention in racing games ever), but we’re able to contrive a level of contact which keeps us basically intact, but absolutely ruins Max’s race and sends him deep into the runoff.

So that’s one way.

2. Better strategy

Not the cleanest way, though, admittedly. So we load up F1 25 again and start a new race, this time determined to take the win without also taking a trip to the stewards’ office afterwards.

Drivers in F1 25 are extremely smart about how they use their battery power. They deploy it to fight you when you’re trying to overtake. They’ll use it to stay in DRS range. It’s genuinely impressive to observe, and it gives each race a clear sense of different phases.

They’re less smart about tyre strategy. Most of the time AI drivers will start on the softer tyre option and change to the harder option later in the race. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but you can count on most of the field to adhere to it.

Sure enough, Max starts soft. Having qualified ahead of him, we start on the medium tyre and spend six laps frustrating the four-ish time world champion, aggressively blocking any chance to pass at the cost of our own lap time.

But that’s fine, because we were going to be lapping slower than Max anyway. Now that he’s pitted in for the medium, we take everything remaining out of our own mediums, work up a bit of a gap to Lando, then spend the final five laps absolutely creaming everyone on the softs.

That’s two.

3. A gentle nudge

Look, we’re not proud of this. But it’s Baku. The barriers loom large at every corner, and some of them have runoff areas so long, it’s not actually clear which country you’re in anymore when you go down them. So if you’re looking for as many ways to beat Max Verstappen as possible, your gaze starts to linger on those barriers.

Max has a lot of pace here in F1 25. The soothsayers at Codemasters evidently saw his late-season resurgence coming, and consequently he’s stuck to our rear wing in just about every attempt, within the first two laps or so, however he qualifies.

That’s absolutely fine though, because at turn two we work him wide in the braking zone, hold that wide position and then… squeeze a bit.

It’s impossible to apportion blame for his retirement. Last we saw, bits of front wing and tyre were making a real mess of the runoff, but that’s all we can say on the matter.

4. Spamming Baku in hotlap mode

Back to the legitimate approach. Have you spent much time racing this circuit in the F1 series? Difficult, isn’t it? There’s barely any margin for error anywhere, and if you’re even slightly offline in areas like turn 8 (aka Charles Leclerc’s “I am stupid” corner) you will be leaving substantial parts of your car behind.

So for the first time ever, perhaps, we knuckle down and just work the circuit out in hotlap mode. We apply a competitive setup from one of the top 100 leaderboard times and get comfy, racing our own ghost and finding the odd tenth every few laps until, hours later, we’re at least semi-competent. 1.5 seconds a lap faster than we were before, in fact.

And really, there’s not much more of interest to say about this route to victory. We used that hotlap setup in the race, applied our honed-in brake markers, and broke away from DRS range within four laps. Very effective. We recommend it, McLaren.

5. Mandatory pit stop

The most legitimate route to victory was the least boring and also, somehow, the least satisfying. What does that say about human nature?

Preferring not to ponder that question for fear of reaching dark conclusions, instead we decide that this race we’re going to force Max into the pitlane.

Imagine his outrage. In fact, imagining those radio messages is all we can do, because there’s no way they’d ever be broadcast.

Baku’s layout is particularly well suited to this bit of, er, sportsmanship, because the pit lane entry branches away from the long main straight in such a way that if someone were pursuing closely behind, you could move over to the left and block their path.

So we do it. It takes quite a few presses of the rewind button to stitch together the perfect sequence of shimmies and squeezes, but sure enough we send the Red Bull to a mandatory second stop.

Probably best to skip this one, if you’re a McLaren race strategist watching this. We got away with it, but we doubt it would escape the broadcast team’s eye were it to transpire in real life.