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

The plaudits poured in for Max Verstappen after he clinched his fourth world title in the Las Vegas Grand Prix, as his rivals queued up to pay tribute to a towering achievement from a driver recognised as one of the all-time greats of Formula 1.

Every single one of Verstappen’s peers recognised this performance for what it is – an almost flawless season from a driver who did not have the best car for the majority of the season.

Lando Norris, who ran him closest, said: “Massive congrats to him. He’s deserved it. He has not put a foot wrong the whole year. That’s a strength of his. He has no downsides, no negatives.

“When he’s had the quickest car, he dominated races. When he’s not had the quickest car, he still been just behind us and almost winning the races anyway. He has not had any bad races all year. He has just driven as Max has always driven, which is perfectly 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 to and then 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 was going to go right to the wire and it didn’t.”

And Russell’s team-mate Lewis Hamilton, who fought a titanic scrap for the title with Verstappen in 2021, said: “He has done a fantastic job, not made any mistakes and delivered every time and every point he is supposed 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 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 not everyone appreciated what we achieved as a team. Of course the car was dominant but it wasn’t as dominant as people thought it was.

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

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

This is the mark of the truly great drivers, to out-perform their car, take it to places it perhaps doesn’t deserve, and do so consistently, race after race, grinding out the results when sometimes they don’t seem possible.

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

“From Miami onwards,” he said, “most of the time we were not the quickest any more and that is very early on in the season – 50-60 points can be very easily overturned if you keep maximising points and don’t do anything crazy.

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

The raw statistics of race wins tell their own story of 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 – when 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 of all time – in the pouring rain of Sao Paulo, he won from 17th on the grid.

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

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

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

Over the first four races, the Red Bull was on average 0.436secs quicker than the McLaren – and 0.265secs over the Ferrari, which was then the second quickest car.

But take out those first four races, and McLaren are the fastest by 0.006secs. And that number keeps going up the more of the early-season races you take out of the calculation. To the extent that in the second half of the season, the McLaren is faster on average by 0.124secs.

Despite the McLaren being a faster car on balance following the Miami upgrade, Verstappen continued winning in 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 versus 3.4.

That’s just the raw pace. Even more impressive was how Verstappen nearly always maximised his results. It’s hard to find a race when he and Red Bull didn’t get the best he could 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 result.

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella is a man who knows something about domination, overachieving and the importance of consistency.

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

He performed the same role for Fernando Alonso when the Spaniard took the title battle to the wire in the fourth fastest car in 2012, in one of the all-time great seasons, which had there been any sporting justice, he would have ended as champion rather than Red Bull’s 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 Max is one of the best drivers in the history of F1,” Stella said. “And it is almost an important one for him because possibly in the past, like last year, people might have thought it was easy to win races when you have the best car. But it is never easy to win so consistently.

“There are always so many reasons why it can go wrong. Already last year driver and team were operating at a very high level. But this year, what he could extract from weekends when he didn’t have the best material confirms we are in the era of Max Verstappen and he deserves what he is achieving.”

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

“We have a lot of incredible young talent in the sport and Lando is definitely 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 overperform. It doesn’t happen every weekend, sometimes you can. And that’s what we did.

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

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

Against Lewis Hamilton, Verstappen fought tooth and nail intensely all year and clinched it in that controversial finale in Abu Dhabi when the race director rode roughshod through the rule book.

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 drawing on all his skillset to maintain the lead despite his car’s performance advantage quickly turning into a deficit.

Norris said: “I’m very proud of the team for putting up the fight for so long. For catching up as much as we did.

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

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

“Nobody is unbeatable,” Russell said. “You go through these phases where teams and drivers together are dominating and people think: ‘If I went up alongside 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 of all time and Max is right up there with Lewis. So I also believe Max is beatable.”