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The ongoing 2026 F1 season has been all about a recently-turned-20-year-old prodigy who has taken the sport by storm. Young Italian Kimi Antonelli reeled off five straight wins inside the first six races of the campaign to establish himself as the youngest driver ever to lead a world championship, and even a mid-season wobble did nothing to slow him down once he found his rhythm again with a win in Belgium.
Podiums followed in Hungary and the Netherlands, and after twelve rounds, he sits on 242 points, with six wins, six poles and ten podiums to his name — a 59-point lead over the tied Mercedes and Ferrari pairing of George Russell and Lewis Hamilton, both on 183, with eleven races still to run.
Somewhere behind that procession, though, something rather familiar has started stirring. Defending champion Lando Norris arrived at Zandvoort trailing Antonelli by 91 points; he left it 83 points back, having won in Hungary and then again in the Netherlands to climb to 159 points. Reduce the deficit further, and this stops looking like a hopeless chase and starts looking eerily like the fightback Norris watched Max Verstappen mount against him just twelve months ago.
Online betting sites still make Antonelli the clear favourite to become F1’s youngest world champion ever come December. However, outlets such as the popular Sportaza online sportsbook have recently slashed odds on Norris successfully defending his title down to 8/1, still miles behind 1/4 favourite Antonelli, but good enough for a spot as the second-favourite ahead of both Russell and Hamilton. So, this is the question worth asking now: can Norris complete the job that Verstappen couldn’t 12 months ago?
What Happened in 2025?
Rewind to the summer of 2025, and Verstappen’s bid for a fifth consecutive title looked dead in the water. Heading out of the Dutch Grand Prix, he trailed championship leader Oscar Piastri by 104 points, a deficit so vast that his odds of winning the title blew out to 100/1 with nine races left on the calendar. Make no mistake; this wasn’t a comeback story that anyone had expected to write.
And then Verstappen started winning. Monza, Baku, Austin, Las Vegas, Qatar, Abu Dhabi — six victories from those nine remaining races reeled Piastri’s advantage back in as the Australian’s own form faltered under pressure. Norris, not Piastri, emerged as the man best placed to resist Verstappen’s charge, his own back-to-back wins in Mexico and Brazil vaulting him past his teammate and into the role of championship leader.
Verstappen closed with a flourish few saw coming, winning each of the final three races. In almost any other year, that run wins the title outright. Norris held his nerve instead, finishing third in the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix to be crowned champion by a margin of just two points — Verstappen’s extraordinary comeback falling agonizingly short.
The Parallels
The parallels between that fightback and Norris’s current predicament are difficult to ignore, and perhaps too neat to be entirely coincidental. Both men arrived as defending champions, cast suddenly as hunters rather than hunted. Verstappen spent the first half of 2025 wrestling a recalcitrant Red Bull, salvaging wins in Japan and Emilia Romagna while McLaren pulled steadily clear; Norris’s 2026 has followed almost the identical arc, with podiums in Miami and Barcelona standing as rare high points in a season otherwise dictated by Mercedes and a rampant Antonelli.
One manufacturer monopolized the front of the grid in 2025. Another has done exactly the same a year later. And where Verstappen faced a 104-point mountain when his revival began, Norris’s is smaller but no less daunting.
But, much as Verstappen did with back-to-back wins at Monza and Baku, Norris has also seemingly found his form, and he has done so with more time to spare than Super Max did last term. His back-to-back wins in Hungary and the Netherlands mean he now needs to claw back a deficit of 83 points to Antonelli in ten races, whereas Verstappen’s margin was 104 points in nine races. But will that make a difference come the end of the season?
Can Norris Succeed Where Verstappen Failed?
Verstappen, in the end, ran out of road, undone by a deficit too large even for six wins in nine races and a three-race winning streak to fully close. The question hanging over the rest of 2026 is whether Norris can finish what his rival started but couldn’t complete.
The mathematics demand something close to perfection: Norris cannot simply match Antonelli lap for lap and points-scored for points-scored; he needs to consistently outscore him, ideally through the kind of winning run Verstappen produced, while hoping Mercedes shows some of the late-season fragility that very nearly undid McLaren a year ago. A handful of Antonelli errors would help enormously, but Norris can’t build a title defence around hoping for misfortune that may never come.
Is there a case, though, that Norris is better equipped for this than Verstappen ever was? Antonelli remains a driver in only his second full season, with none of the title-run experience that Norris now carries in his back pocket. Norris knows precisely what it takes to close out a championship, having lived through the fine margins and suffocating pressure of a decider just last December, and having watched, from the winning side, exactly what a rampaging Verstappen looks like.
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