Why Verstappen’s ‘almost flawless’ season is ‘towering performance’

Rosters poured in for Max Verstappen after he won his fourth world title at the Las Vegas Grand Prix as his rivals lined up to pay tribute to a towering performance from a driver recognized as one of the all-time greats of Formula 1 .

Every single one of Verstappen’s peers recognized this performance for what it is – a near flawless season from a driver who didn’t have the best car for the majority of the season.

Lando Norris, who ran closest to him, said: “Big congratulations to him. He’s earned it. He hasn’t put a foot wrong all year. That’s his strength. He’s got no downsides, no downsides.

“When he’s had the fastest car, he’s dominated races. When he hasn’t had the fastest car, he’s still been right behind us and almost won the races anyway. He hasn’t had a bad race all year. He’s just driven like Max has always driven which is perfect and can’t fault him anywhere.”

“Exceptional,” said Mercedes driver George Russell, who won the race under the lights of Sin City. “He had a dominant car at the start of the year and got the wins when he needed it and then he probably thought he wasn’t going to win the championship.

“And then he delivered week in, week out and got the result the car was capable of and his rivals didn’t. I thought it would go straight to the wire and it didn’t.”

And Russell’s team-mate Lewis Hamilton, who is fighting a huge title battle with Verstappen in 2021, said: “He’s done a fantastic job, made no mistakes and delivered every time and every point he has to. Really happy for him.”

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said he believed this was the best of Verstappen’s four titles.

Verstappen felt that 2023, when he and Red Bull broke all the records for the most dominant in F1 history, was “my best season”, adding: “Last year I had a dominant car but I always felt that not everyone appreciated what we achieved as a Of course the car was dominant, but it wasn’t as dominant as people thought it was.

“I will always look back on it because even though we didn’t have the best set-up in the races in some places, we were still able to win races because the car was quite strong.

“But I’m also very proud of this season because for the most part – I would say for 70% – we didn’t have the fastest car. But actually we still extended our lead, so that’s something I’m very proud of.”

These are the hallmarks of the truly great drivers, to outperform their car, take it to places it might not deserve, and do it consistently, race after race, grinding out results when sometimes they don’t seem possible .

Despite McLaren coming on strong and periodic challenges from both Ferrari and Mercedes, Verstappen remained laser-focused on what he needed to achieve.

“From Miami on,” he said, “most of the time we weren’t the fastest anymore and it’s very early in the season – 50-60 points can be knocked over very easily if you keep maximizing points and don’t that. something crazy.

“I experienced that myself in 2022. Everything is possible. I always had that in the back of my mind and focused on what I could control and gave it my all every single weekend.”

Raw race results don’t tell the whole story

The raw statistics of race wins tell their own story about Verstappen’s performance. He won four of the first five races and seven of the first 10. Then there was a five-month period – a run of 10 grands prix – where he did not win at all.

When he finally broke that duck, it was with a drive that will go down in history as one of the greatest ever – in the pouring rain of Sao Paulo, he won from 17th place.

Yet even the raw race results don’t tell the full story of the extent of Verstappen’s performance. For that, it is necessary to dig a little deeper into the raw pace of the two title contenders’ cars.

Over the course of the season as a whole, Red Bull is, even now, the fastest car on average over a qualifying lap – by 0.078sec.

But that figure is skewed by the size of Red Bull’s advantage at the start of the year.

Over the first four races, Red Bull averaged 0.436sec. faster than McLaren – and 0.265 sec. over the Ferrari, which was then the second fastest car.

But take the first four races and McLaren is fastest by 0.006sec. And that number keeps rising the more early season races you take out of the equation. To the extent that in the second half of the season McLaren is faster on average by 0.124 sec.

Despite the McLaren being a faster car overall after the Miami upgrade, Verstappen went on to win at Imola, Spain and Canada.

And despite that performance picture, over the season as a whole, Verstappen still has a higher average qualifying position than Norris – 2.8 to 3.4.

It’s just the raw pace. Even more impressive was how Verstappen almost always maximized his results. It’s hard to find a race when he and Red Bull didn’t get the best out of the car. Whereas Norris and McLaren between them will admit that in Canada, Silverstone and Monza at least better results were available than they achieved. And there were other races where small margins made big differences in the outcome.

‘No one is invincible’ – who can stop Verstappen?

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella is a man who knows something about dominance, over-performance and the importance of consistency.

He was Michael Schumacher’s race engineer at Ferrari when the German won five consecutive titles.

He played the same role for Fernando Alonso when the Spaniard took the title race to the line in the fourth fastest car in 2012, in one of those great seasons which, had there been any sporting justice, would have finished as champion ahead of the Red Bulls Sebastian Vettel.

And now he has had to watch Verstappen do the same to his team.

“Four world championships in a row and this title confirms that Max is one of the best drivers in F1 history,” said Stella. “And it’s almost important to him because maybe in the past, like last year, people thought it was easy to win races when you have the best car. But it’s never easy to win that consistently.

“There are always so many reasons why it can go wrong. Already last year the driver and the team drove at a very high level. But this year it confirms what he could extract from weekends where he didn’t have the best material, we are on. Max Verstappen’s era and he deserves what he’s getting.”

Verstappen paid tribute to Norris’ efforts – while underlining the differences between their two seasons.

“We have a lot of incredible young talent in the sport and Lando is certainly one of them and at times he made it very difficult for me,” he said. “We simply didn’t have an answer in many races where they were just clearly faster and that made it difficult.

“But to win a championship you have to be consistent and sometimes you try to overachieve. It doesn’t happen every weekend, sometimes you can. And that’s what we did.

“McLaren at the moment are extremely strong. Lando, driving a friend for the title is always different. We have a lot of respect for each other and I’m sure we will have many battles in the future.”

Verstappen’s four consecutive titles have come under very different circumstances.

Against Lewis Hamilton, Verstappen fought hard tooth and nail all year and beat it. the controversial final in Abu Dhabi when the race director ran hard through the rulebook.

In 2022 he had to overcome Ferrari’s fast start and went on to dominate the second part of the season, form which continued into 2023 and the start of this season, before he drew on all his skills to maintain the lead despite his car’s performance advantage quickly converted into a deficit.

Norris said: “I’m very proud of the team for fighting for so long. To catch up as much as we did.

“We were the fourth best team at the beginning of the season. We had too big a deficit to make up and we couldn’t because they have still been too strong.”

And despite acknowledging Verstappen’s quality, others also feel they can take him on, given the right car.

“No one is invincible,” Russell said. “You go through these phases where teams and drivers together dominate and people think: ‘If I went up with them, I wouldn’t be able to compete against them.’

“But you have to believe in yourself. When I teamed up with Lewis, Lewis is the greatest ever and Max is right up there with Lewis. So I also believe that Max can be beaten.”