The numbers that show this are Max Verstappen’s best championship

By many metrics, Max Verstappen’s championship win in 2024 falls short of his previous three titles. It lacks the excitement, drama and controversy of his first in 2021. It struggles to match the relentless quality of both 2022 and 2023, where he won 34 of 44 races.

Verstappen himself described his fourth crown as challenging, while Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said it was the Dutchman’s “best and hardest championship”. It’s hard to disagree, and the lack of wins and pole positions since late spring shows that.

After seven victories in the first 10 rounds, Verstappen has taken just one more victory. He has often had the third or fourth fastest car, yet has held off a challenge from a resurgent, if flawed, McLaren and Lando Norris.

Digging a little deeper into the numbers, however, gives a greater understanding of Verstappen’s performance, as well as how unusual Formula 1 has been in the past eight months.

41 years

The last time a driver won the championship with a car that did not finish in the top two in the constructors’ standings was in 1983, when Nelson Piquet won for Brabham, who finished third overall.

Red Bull trails Ferrari by 29 points and sits in third place. With Sergio Perez’s dismal form, they look unlikely to be overtaken in the final two rounds in Qatar and Abu Dhabi. This would make Verstappen only the third man in F1 history to take the crown in a machine that finished third or worse, after Piquet 41 years ago and Williams’ Keke Rosberg in 1982.

Much of this is because Perez has been almost useless for Red Bull, but there is little doubt that Verstappen has often had to contend with the third and occasionally the fourth fastest car.

Six points per ran

Verstappen has had a dip in results since the Miami Grand Prix in May, when McLaren’s upgrade package turned their car into a race winner. Even with Miami, the points-per-round figure was 22.67, but that has since dropped to 16.67.

Despite this, Verstappen was still scoring more than Norris after this point, getting the most out of his car when Norris too often didn’t. Despite McLaren’s rapid progress, Norris improved his points-per-lap figure after Miami by 2.23 – from 13.83 points to 16.06.

5.44 times

While Verstappen’s results dropped after Miami, Perez’s decline destroyed Red Bull’s hopes of a championship double. After a strong start to the season with 103 points in the first five rounds, the Mexican not only managed to finish on the podium in the following 16 events, but his highest points tally over a weekend was his eight at Zandvoort.

Verstappen’s points total from Imola to Las Vegas is 267, while Perez’s is a paltry 49. In comparison, Haas’ Nico Hulkenberg scored 29 points in the same period. In other words, in that time Verstappen has scored 5.44 times as many points as his beleaguered teammate.

Not since 1983 has a team-mate of a title-winning driver finished as low as eighth at the end of the season, when Riccardo Patrese was ninth to championship-winning Piquet at Brabham. However, it was during a time of far higher attrition, with the Italian retiring from nine of the 15 rounds that year, compared to Piquet’s four non-finishes.

3.8

Having won seven of the first 10 rounds and extended his championship lead to 69 points over Norris, Verstappen has averaged a podium finish since June’s Austrian Grand Prix. In the first 10 rounds, his average finishing position was 1.67 but in the next 12 it dropped to 3.8 – only slightly worse than Norris (3.36).

His total of two podiums in seven grands prix finishes between Austria and Azerbaijan is also his worst run in any comparable period since 2017, his first full season with Red Bull.

10 in a row

In 2023, Verstappen broke the record for most consecutive Grand Prix wins with a perfect run from Miami to Monza. In 2024, however, he endured a winless run of 10 grands prix, stretching from Austria until his superb win in the rain at Interlagos.

Before that, the last time he went without standing on the top step of the podium for that long was an 11-race run in 2020 – a year in which he won just two races.

52 points

What Verstappen needs to score in the final two rounds (two grands prix and a sprint race) to overtake his championship-winning score in 2022.

That season was over two fewer rounds (22 to 24), so the points-per-lap differential is 18.31 this year compared to 20.6 in 2022. The record days in 2023, when Verstappen scored 575 points (26.13 per round) and won 19 out of 22 grand prix is ​​a distant memory now.

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