Interviews Executive
Speaking to PokerScout, 1997 F1 World Champion Jacques Villeneuve gave his review of the 2025 F1 season, praising Lando Norris and Max Verstappen. He spoke on ‘Papaya Rules’ at McLaren, Oscar Piastri’s season, and Helmut Marko leaving Red Bull. He also touched on what he expects to see in the coming season of F1 from the likes of Carlos Sainz and Williams.
PokerScout: Lando Norris has done it. The 11th British driver to be crowned world champion. He did it quite comfortably in the end despite Max Verstappen’s superlative drive and his best efforts.
Jacques Villeneuve: Max needed Charles Leclerc to get ahead of Norris. That’s the only thing. So, he needed a little bit of outside help.
And Lando was driving more on the defensive the whole race, just going what he needed to do to go on and win the championship. He had a good second half of the season, a very good recovery. Max was exemplary all season. He lost a few points in Barcelona and that’s it.
Just the fact that he was in the fight in that last race and finished second in the championship is an incredible achievement. Norris fought hard last year and didn’t win it.
And once he focused on fighting Verstappen this year, he drove better. It’s different when you fight your teammate and a driver from a different team. It’s a different approach. Lando seems to be much stronger when he’s fighting Max.
Is he a worthy champion?
He is very good in the second half of the season! The same thing happened last year. This year, his first part other than Melbourne was nondescript. Baku was a wake up call. From then on, he drove superbly.
You’ve been a world champion. How different will life be for Lando now, and how did it change for you?
Everyone is different. You just have to look at Nico Rosberg. He became champion. He hated driving. And he quit.
So, it just depends. Some drivers, like Max, just launch them into the stratosphere. It makes them better and hungrier. Because they are actually true racers and passionate.
Who knows how it will affect Lando. You could tell from his reaction that it was an incredible goal for Lando.
How did it change for you in 1997? You’re part of a very elite group of men.
It changed for me because I didn’t win again afterwards! That wasn’t good.
Actually, it just made me drive even harder. I was even more confident in my direction and my driving.
In ‘97, I ended up driving with more confidence because I’d achieved one goal, but my ultimate goal is to race. I’ve always been passionate.
That’s what we will discover from Lando now, just how passionate he is; if his ultimate goal was only to become a world champion or to be a full-on racing car driver like Max.
Only 35 drivers have won the F1 title in 75 years; 11 of them have been British. Do they have an advantage, or are they just better?
There are a lot more British drivers for a start!
And 90% of the teams are British. So, a lot of racing is British-based. Ultimately, we have a lot of British drivers in F1, so that will tend to help.
That makes your achievement and people like you that you’re even more incredible, doesn’t it?
Yes, there are not many Canadians, that is very true!
But then you have other nationalities that have had a lot of drivers, but they have a hard time to get champions.
Who knows what the secret is; is it because you get in the right team at the right time, you have the right habit?
But obviously, the majority of teams, mechanics, and staff are British.
That might help the way you work, it might make it easier inside the team.
But you don’t have to be British to be a world champion. There’s just more British drivers coming through the ranks.
How big an achievement is it for McLaren to win both titles after all they’ve been through, with the Papaya rules and the setbacks?
They had the car to win it. It was a championship where if they had not won it, it would have been a big disappointment. It would have been very embarrassing if they had not won it this year.
They recovered at the end with Lando. But Max really gave them a hard time, and I think that caught them by surprise.
We wouldn’t have had this dramatic season without one man, Max Verstappen. The way he’s come back was incredible.
It’s always more exciting when the fight is against a driver from a different team. It’s a much more open battle compared to a fight in between two teammates. And that’s what we had in the end, actually. A battle of three as well.
What will McLaren have learned from 2025, not least in terms of Papaya rules?
We don’t even know what the papaya rules are! It’s just a name which goes with the colour of the car. Ultimately, every team has rules, that drivers who are teammates should not run into each other.
It’s the norm. They just don’t give it a special name, a nickname like McLaren did. That’s all. Without a nickname, you cannot make fun of it! It’s that simple. And ultimately, it’s not just team rules, it’s whatever the drivers have in that contract. It’s that simple.
I think the one thing they have realized is that you always need to stay on your toes. You can’t go to sleep because you will get caught out. And they almost were. It doesn’t matter how superior you are, there’s always someone hiding there to come and get you.
Lando’s only 26. What’s his potential, how far can he go and can he get better?
He’s been in F1 for quite a long time now, so he has experience, he honed his skill, and at the end of the season, he drove like he did at the end of last season. That’s his very good level.
What he has to work on is keeping it going all year, for 24 races.
But we also saw quite a change in him during the season. Early in the season, he was always berating himself a lot. And that stopped in the second half. We saw a change of attitude as well.
He stopped apologizing for things, and he actually focused on what needed to be done. Once he wasn’t in championship lead anymore, once things went backwards, and once the fight became a fight against Max.
Can they stay friends? Are they friends? What’s the relationship?
Nothing nasty happened on the track. So, there’s no reason for any social changes in their relationship.
There was always respect. There was no one putting the other one in the wall or being nasty. So, there shouldn’t be any change there. That would be surprising.
And ultimately, Max will be happier to fight more world champions! That’s his nature.
Max has just missed out on a fifth title. Will he be frustrated or take pride in the fact that he got so close when he was so far away?
A bit of frustration, but halfway through the season, he didn’t think that he was even in the fight. So that was like Christmas when he got into that position. That was a bonus to even get a peep at it.
He’ll be frustrated with the virtual safety car in Mexico, that was costly, more than anything.
He couldn’t have done any more, could he? He is the star of the year, isn’t he?
Max has shown why he’s part of the greats of the sport, up there with the Sennas and the Prosts, and the Mansells of this world, and the greats who came before.
He just doesn’t stop. He’s relentless. He’s a pure racer and a passionate one, so that’s what you want to see. That’s what you want champions to become.
Talking of champions, do you think he can go on to seven or eight?
He has the talent, so give him a chance, and he will snag it. Yes.
There’s more change coming at Red Bull. Helmut Marko is reportedly leaving. Does that surprise you?
Helmut Marko leaving Red Bull was a big shock, because we all were under the impression that it was a power play between Horner and Marko. But now they’re both out. So that was not the power play!
The whole team is just rebranding. Since Dietrich Mateschitz passed away, it was always going to be a new team.
The old guard was going to go at some point.
So, they’ve done pretty well to be competitive in the second half of season as they have been?
Red Bull’s second half of the season was mainly down to Max and his engineer, and then the team on the track, and how they worked on the car and how they maximized every situation.
That small group of people worked really well, and they probably would need to carry on together. They have good chemistry.
Laurent Mekies has done a good job taking the reins of this team so quickly.
It’s not easy to jump into a team when there’s a lot of chaos going on. To walk in there and be respected and make sure that the boat still floats and is going in the right direction, or in a better direction, takes some doing. He’s been part and parcel of that.
How will Oscar be feeling after there’s such a season of up and down fortunes?
It’s tough because Oscar led for most of it. He was on the way up, but I guess he was climbing too early in the season. It was the wrong time to have the momentum, I guess. But Baku was costly. I think Baku really affected him.
In the last two races, he was quick, but it took him a while to get that momentum going again, which is very strange. And at the time when Norris actually stepped on the gas.
It’s a long season, and when you lead it for so long, and you have a big advantage in your mind, you think, “Okay, I’m there, all I need is to not make mistakes.”
Then you throw it away. It can be frustrating, but he knows he can drive fast, so if the car permits, he’ll get another shot.
That’s the issue with the regulation changes; no one knows which team will be quick, and it might not be McLaren.
That aside, Zak Brown has said Piastri will be world champion one day. Do you think that’s realistic from what you’ve seen this year?
He might. Zak Brown should have said Oscar might be world champion, not will be.
It was the same thing for Norris. This was the one year where he had to go and grab it. Because who knows what the regulations will do.
What will Oscar have learned from this season, however painful it might have been.
You have to be tough. That’s the crux of it. On the outside, it looks all nice and chummy, but it’s a tough world. And it didn’t work out this year, and he knows he had that championship in his hand. He was controlling it.
And that’s why it’s tougher for him than for Max, for example, who never expected to win it anyway.
Out of the three drivers, it’s toughest for Oscar. Because he finished third in the end, behind Max, not even second. That will grate him. That’s something that he will have to digest this winter. Hopefully for him, he comes back to that first test a completely new man, forgetting completely about this season.
He starts from zero, and fresh.
If you were him with Mark Webber, his manager, would you be looking at options elsewhere, or do you think McLaren is the best place?
McLaren was the best car. They proved that. He’s under contract.
It’s a fickle word. Some years, every team wants you at any cost, and two years later, they’ve moved on to something and someone else. You’re only as good as your last race, basically. That’s what teams and people look at.
He had a great image when he was at Alpine before coming into McLaren. Teams were fighting each other to get him.
The second half of the season didn’t do much good in that respect. So, he has to rebuild that confidence a little.
Is Verstappen the star of the year?
No doubt, Verstappen was star of the year. He’s been on it all year. The only time he threw points away was Barcelona, which weren’t that many.
He was always there, he out-drove that car so well that he put himself in the championship picture when he shouldn’t have been. And that’s after winning four championships, three of them easily.
It didn’t put him to sleep; so he’s showing that he’s the real deal. He’s in a different league. He’s in the league of all the great champions that there have been. Not every champion has been a great champion.
Where do you rank this season in terms of competition, excitement, drama, appeal?
It’s one of the good ones because after the first few races, we thought it would be a straight battle between the McLarens, and it won’t even be exciting.
And they managed to keep the drama going until the last race. To finish with only a two-point difference with 24 Grand Prix, when it’s 25 points a win, that’s nothing. It’s amazing.
Who was your unsung hero of the season?
I was surprised by the smaller teams like Williams and Sauber, Williams especially
Carlos Sainz has basically changed the team. The team stepped forward and got results that were much higher than what they were anticipating because the car had really evolved.
You could say the same with Sauber and with Nico Hulkenburg and Gabriel Bortoleto. They were a bit of a surprise.
I was expecting it from Sainz. That’s why he was signed. The team is making the right racing decisions in terms of the drivers. It’s racing after all. And that’s what they’re doing.
And will Ferrari be thinking, what have we done by letting him go?
They’ve been saying that they’ve just focused on next season, so let’s wait and see. It’s strange because there were races where there were competitors, others where they weren’t.
There was no balance in when or why they were competitive. It was really odd to see from the outside.
If Williams had a really good car, would Carlos Sainz have the potential to be a world champion?
It’s hard to quantify whether he has the potential to be a world champion or not. Probably the answer is yes.
It’s very hard to judge until a driver is in the position to go and win it. It’s a different mindset. There are a lot of super-fast drivers who will never, ever win the championship.
Some drivers are a little bit slower, but they have what it takes to go and get the championship. It’s worth giving him a shot, though, the way he operates.
Who has been the rookie of the year in your opinion?
I would choose Ollie Bearman. He was at Haas, and he was generally super quick. It depends which part of the season you look at.
Antonelli had generally a good end of the season; Bearman as well, and Bortoleto in the middle of the season was super good. Isack Hadjar had spikes of brilliance. But none of them kept it going the whole season, basically.
But overall, I go for Bearman.
Which team has been the most disappointing then? Ferrari?
I don’t want to comment on them really; I’ll just get hate mail again.
It’s easy to criticize Ferrari because they’re in the limelight. So, you always see everything they do or don’t do. That’s not the case with other teams.
What can we expect in 2026 then? Two or three-second gaps in qualifying? One team way better?
The gaps will be bigger. The strategies will be very different because they will have to use their battery and their movable wing, and so on. So, there’s a lot of things we’ll discover.
We don’t know what to expect. That’s the thing. It could be great, it could be off. Let’s hope it’s great. It’s a big change, and it will be a big change in approach on how they race.
Not every driver will adapt to it well, not every team will adapt to it well.
DRS is officially gone. What will its replacement be like?
I did not like the DRS, that’s for sure. So, let’s hope the alternative is better. Do we anticipate any driver changes or movements, if maybe not next year, but obviously for 27?
Well, Max has a one-year deal, so he’s there waiting to see what’s going on. He’s the one, he’s the puppet master. He can go anywhere. Any team would be stupid not to take him.
Does it all depend on how the Ford unit goes or will he only look to go somewhere that is better?
All his cars have been made by Adrian Newey, somehow, in some ways.
It’s such a big question mark next year. That’s the aspect I find exciting about the new rules. We don’t know what to expect. We kind of knew this year that the McLaren would be quick.
So, it wasn’t a surprise. Now it was quicker than expected. Next year it’s shot out in the dark. It could be any of the teams. It’s amazing.
Image credit: Jorjum/Wikimedia Commons (license)
