When Max Verstappen said a week ago that he was only in Formula 1 title contention because of McLaren's "failures", he probably did not expect one of its biggest blunders yet to open the door even more going into the season finale.
Yet that is exactly what occurred in Qatar, where McLaren cost Oscar Piastri what would have been a comfortable race win. McLaren driver Lando Norris still holds a 12-point lead in the championship before this weekend's Abu Dhabi race but it is now Verstappen who is his closest threat. Piastri is a further four points adrift.
What has been a two-horse race between the McLaren drivers for so much of this season has been blown wide open by Verstappen's dogged resilience, Red Bull's revival in the final third of the championship - and, as Verstappen pointed out, several errors from his opposition.
Verstappen said in Qatar that he would have won the title a long time ago if he had been driving the McLaren. Whether you believe him, or how soon you think he could have been champion this year with that car, probably depends on what rules you apply to his hypothetical scenario. But the most interesting thing about Verstappen's comments is they shine a harsh light on McLaren's wastefulness in 2025.
It may yet win both championships - but the drivers' title has been a real chore. And Verstappen is right in that he really should not be in the picture, as both McLaren drivers have lost a huge number of points this season.
Identifying 'lost points' is entirely subjective as if you apply it super strictly it covers every result that is not a win. Rather than assume a McLaren should have won every single race this season - an unrealistic and unfair expectation - we should consider the occasions Norris and Piastri did not score a realistically achievable, better result.
No driver has a perfect season so getting jumped off the line or losing a place into the first corner is, essentially, just the kind of thing that can happen. There are cases where a McLaren driver was just pipped to pole position and did not win as a result, like in Japan, or was on pole but did not win after getting jumped on lap one, like with Piastri at Imola.
To count as a "failure" - which is Verstappen's phrasing - it must be a driver error that meaningfully moved the needle, a team screw-up, or a swing in race circumstances that were out of a driver's control.
Across the whole season, by our subjective measure, Piastri lost out most. There are 84 points legitimately on the table, fairly evenly split between Piastri’s errors and other facts - 87 if you count the three points he lost being forced to give second place back to Norris in the Italian Grand Prix after the combination of an accidental Piastri undercut and a slow Norris pitstop put McLaren's emphasis on equality between its drivers firmly in the spotlight.
The biggest individual loss is in Australia when he went off on slicks in the rain - an understandable mistake in terrible conditions but a mistake nonetheless.
Piastri has also had three wins turn into second place: at Silverstone due to a harsh penalty for his driving at the safety car restart, in Hungary when McLaren let Norris switch to what was unexpectedly the race-winning strategy, and of course with McLaren's bungling of the safety car in Qatar. If you are on Piastri's side, none of those should have happened (the Silverstone penalty was massively criticised by McLaren at the time).
Much has been made of the difficult run Piastri has had since his last win at Zandvoort, which has included a heavy loss of points between his error-strewn Azerbaijan weekend, sprint race crashes in the US and Brazil, the widely derided penalty he got in the grand prix in Brazil, and his Vegas disqualification.
That's before even factoring a loss of three points being pushed out the way by Norris in Singapore - small fry compared to some others, but it all adds up, and McLaren did ultimately find Norris at fault for that incident.
Some losses are easier to quantify than others. Azerbaijan, for example, is tough to determine where a McLaren could or should have been on a trickier weekend. But even if you take the view that Red Bull and Mercedes were superior in Baku, Carlos Sainz was on the podium for Williams - so Norris (being the more comfortable McLaren driver in Azerbaijan) and Piastri should have been aiming for third and fourth at least. So that is the points loss we have applied.
Hence we get our theoretical maximum points loss tally of 87 for Piastri which, as aforementioned, does not include a few races that we have dismissed as the sort of things that just happens over a season, as no driver is perfect.
That is a huge tally accrued in a lot of different ways, which serves to illustrate how many factors that have combined to potentially prevent Piastri from being world champion in a year he has generally performed to a very high level - and clearly made a strong step in his third season.
If he is not world champion, it should also be a warning against making sweeping judgements that one specific thing cost him the title, because clearly there are various combinations of losses you could make up to claim made the difference.
And Norris isn't far off, either. His big miss was the engine shutdown at Zandvoort that cost him second, and he lost the same position again in Las Vegas. That's half the 72 points we've counted in our tally right there.
His most costly mistakes were at the start of the season qualifying and then racing poorly in the China sprint, crashing in Saudi Arabia qualifying, and driving into Piastri in Canada. But he also had a limp Baku weekend, and was taken out in Piastri’s Austin sprint race shunt too.
Norris did lose out with the safety car call in Qatar, but it is worth noting he could have still finished third. He was just too slow and fell behind Sainz and Kimi Antonelli, only repassing the latter when Antonelli made a mistake. So those dropped three points are actually on Norris.
Both drivers also have a relatively even split between the losses that might be determined to be their fault, and what went against them. You can count a fairly conservative 47 points lost that Piastri could have avoided himself, and 40 unjustly lost in other situations; with Norris costing himself at least 29 points and 43 more going begging on top.
This is without factoring in swings where a lost win for Piastri also directly led to a points gain for Norris (such as Norris inheriting the Silverstone win) or for Verstappen (as in Qatar).
Championship battles are long, gruelling tests. And Verstappen's not been perfect either. He's dropped meaningful points four times this year, twice because of his own errors.
In Spain, he lost his head after being told by Red Bull to let George Russell by, and admits now that his biggest mistake of the year was not controlling his reaction better. Driving into Russell, whether by design or just by needlessly aggressively and carelessly trying to push him wide, with an immediate repass, was just daft.
Verstappen also had a spin at the safety car restart in the wet at Silverstone, which ultimately prevented a podium there.
Still, Verstappen has had the better individual season. He has made the fewest mistakes, and maximised his point-scoring possibilities better. So, in the context of his 'I'd have won the title ages ago' claim, the lost McLaren points are obviously significant in the championship remaining undecided for so long and Verstappen being able to claw his way back into contention.
He probably would be world champion already in a better car. But he's also not had as many points as either Piastri or Norris taken away through unlucky or unfair situations - so it would also be ignorant to the facts to say that Piastri and Norris are solely responsible for not settling this fight sooner.
And if either McLaren driver does ultimately win the title on Sunday, they will happily look at their championship trophy when reflecting on the year over the winter and consider it ample proof their own seasons were still pretty damn good.
