Formula 1 is back.
Imagine how fun it would’ve been to be Max Verstappen in 2021. You begin the year with a cloud hanging over your head. You’ve been racing for five years without a championship. You keep losing to Valtteri Bottas. People have started whispering that maybe you’ll never be one of the greats. But by July 2021, something’s changed. You’re not placing third in every race anymore. The car’s flying like it never used to — Newey’s magic. You go to France and win. You go to Styria and win. You go to Austria and win. You’ve beaten Sir Lewis Hamilton three times in a row. No one’s whispering about you anymore.
Abu Dhabi rolls around, and you’re a champion, the first at RB since Vettel. You more or less get poor Bottas fired by working so well with Checo. Come the new season and the new regulations, people are worried: they should know better by now. You shake Ferrari off and win three in a row, then five in a row, just to be safe. Then three in a row again. Everyone wants to be Max Verstappen.
2023 begins and it’s not a question anymore. You’re winning every race asleep at the wheel. You win ten in a row. That’s a record. People are starting to make comparisons. Hamilton? Vettel? No, surely not… Schumacher? But cracks are beginning to appear. People aren’t cheering anymore, they’re bored, even annoyed. The season ends and nobody’s quite as happy as they were last season. Dietrich Mateschitz is dead, and things are starting to change. Christian Horner and Toto Wolff won’t stop fighting. Christian Horner and Helmut Marko won’t stop fighting. Christian Horner and Jos Verstappen won’t stop fighting.
Come 2024, and they’re talking about Horner in the media. There are allegations. Adrian Newey announces he’s leaving. He wants nothing to do with any of you. Checo’s always been unhappy but he’s not hiding it anymore. Fred Vasseur at Ferrari seems awfully confident. You’re still World Champion, and you’re still the best, but things aren’t quite right. The car is not what it used to be. People are talking about the end of an era. Hoping, even. You’re not as invincible as you used to be. Oh, you cruised through Bahrain and Jeddah but retired with a failure in Australia. You keep seeing Lando Norris in the mirror. Where did he come from? Toto announces he wants to lure you away from Red Bull and no one is that upset. Not like they were when Seb was leaving in 2014. You go to Miami and Norris beats you. No crash, no tricks, he beats you fair and square. You’re not used to that happening.
You go to Monaco and finish sixth. Sixth! George beats you in Austria, then Lewis beats you at Silverstone, and Oscar Piastri at the Hungaroring. You feel old. You’ve forgotten how to lose. You’re on the radio screaming at your team. It’s all the race engineers’ fault. If only you could do it all yourself. You go to Spa and you can’t even get on the podium. Again. Lando Norris has been sounding awfully confident, and his car looks extremely fast. Maybe too fast. It isn’t that fun being Max Verstappen anymore.
Make no mistake though: Verstappen still has a very strong Championship lead. He still has all the skills that have made him dominant over the last few seasons, still has Red Bull’s incredible engineering team behind him, and still has (for now) the sport’s best technical handler in Adrian Newey.
For all the talk about record-breaking competitiveness, Verstappen still leads the Drivers’ by more than 75 points. He is having his worst spell in recent years, but he has still outscored every other driver over the last five races. At the time of writing, leading betting platform Stake.com offers 1/6 odds on Verstappen winning the World Drivers’ Championship, against 7/2 for nearest rival Lando Norris.
Perhaps tellingly, however, the market no longer considers Red Bull the favourite to win the Constructors’. Red Bull is priced at evens, while McLaren is at 11/15. This is at least partly because of the abysmal and, most likely, career-ending season that Sergio Perez is having.
Perez has already signed a contract extension with Red Bull until 2026, but RB is surely regretting it already. After a solid but unspectacular start to the season, the veteran driver has been, to put it crassly, stinking it up. His last five races have seen him classified 7th, 17th, 7th, 8th, and DNF. Results which might be okay for a mid-table constructor, but look awful compared to his teammate in equal machinery. This recent spell of bad form comes at the end of a long tailspin which has seen the driver, who once aspired to be Max’s equal, relegated to being a distant backup.
There is more to Red Bull’s decline than Checo’s many failures though. The RB19 last year was so far ahead of the competition that no competitor could hope to come within 20 seconds of Max. This year, the RB20 has been much, much more vulnerable. Though Max started the season with the same string of victories, they were significantly closer races, won as much by Max’s skill as by the car’s advantages. More recently, Max has been hilariously vocal about the car’s flaws as he was beaten three races in a row.
Max Verstappen has never failed to win four races in a row in the last four years. Counting from Lewis’ wins at Sao Paulo, Qatar and Jeddah during his unsuccessful 2021 title defence to the chaos of the last four weekends, Max Verstappen won 42 of the intervening 55 races. 42, at a win rate of more than 75%! There is no sporting analogy for the supremacy that Verstappen has exerted over this sport for the last two years; it has been an oppressive, stifling couple of years, destroying the sport’s spectacle like never before.
Last season in particular was horrific: at this stage last year, Max had won all but two races (he would go on to win nine of the next ten). His closest rivals were Checo and an inconsistent Alonso, while the nominal title rivals in Ferrari could barely muster up podiums.
By contrast, this season has been an incredible breath of fresh air. It has been more competitive than F1 has been in a long, long time. In only 13 races we have already had 7 different race winners, a number that hasn’t been reached since 2012 (and only twice in the last 30 years). There are now four constructors who could credibly win the championship– something that hasn’t happened practically since before I was born.
That diversity is what has brought the most excitement to the last few races. Though there have been contenders for Max to beat in the last few seasons (Leclerc in 2022, Alonso in 2023), this season they are much better prepared and all over the grid. Compare and contrast:
Though all eyes will now be on Norris and Hamilton taking the fight to Red Bull, it’s worth mentioning how laughable this would’ve sounded at the start of the season. In the first three races, Norris placed 6th, 8th and 3rd– hardly inspirational figures. Though he proceeded to dramatically improve his driving and results, it was only at Monaco that something shifted for McLaren, car-wise. Oscar Piastri showcases this wonderfully, with his four podiums after Imola versus none before.
Before Imola, of course, it was Leclerc who seemed to be Verstappen’s only challenger. The Monegasque hero started the season strongly and perhaps more importantly, consistently. No DNFs for eight races in a row is not nothing for this Ferrari team. Of course, they’re now suffering from reverse McLaren syndrome. Since Imola (and barring the disgraceful Monaco procession), they have grabbed only two podiums in total.
It is Mercedes who seem to have seized the initiative on Ferrari’s behalf– Sir Lewis Hamilton, more specifically. Before Monaco, he was a midtable driver, competing for points without sight of the podium. Since then he’s grabbed four podiums including a home win and a woulda-coulda-shoulda 1-2 at Spa. 39 years old and headed for retirement at Ferrari, Lewis now looks just as likely to beat Max to the championship as Norris.
It is this swing-and-grab change in the initiative– the ability of any constructor and any driver to poke ahead from one race to the next– that has been missing from F1 for so long. This competition is a resounding success for the organization’s regulations, which have driven competition closer and closer for the past several years. We are now in the presence of a sport where a good preseason does not mean a guaranteed championship, where teams like McLaren and Mercedes can come back in the middle of the season and smack you around if you get lazy. At the same time, this is a sport where skilled drivers like Max and Charles still have the ability to bend the race around them, to offset the benefits of machinery through sheer force of will.
F1.com’s power ratings tell the story neatly. While Verstappen was far and ahead the best-performing driver for most of the season, his recent spell of bad performances has placed him squarely behind Norris. Red Bull’s campaign for the Constructors’ championship is not helped by the fact that Sergio Perez has been dropping stinker after stinker– he has not been rated among the top ten drivers for any race since Suzuka, nine races ago.
What stands out from the power ratings this season is how close they are, and how often drivers’ performances have a massive impact on their race position. For the past couple of seasons, when the cars weren’t as competitive with each other, it was entirely possible to have a good race and still not even approach the Red Bulls. Now, minor swings in performance– such as Leclerc’s recent run of bad form– have tangible impacts on the standings.
This season stands out as one of the most fiercely competitive in F1 history, eerily similar to the immensely chaotic 2012 season which started with seven different winners in the first seven races. Though this season started off much more sleepily, the seven different winners in the last thirteen races are a highlight of the incredibly, unpredictably competitive nature of the grid. There are mirrors to the great rivalries all over, and the potential for great Drive to Survive content from so many drivers: Max and Lando, Charles and Carlos, even Lando and Oscar. The result is a thrilling, volatile championship where every race is wide open, every teammate is a rival, and any team can emerge victorious.
In other words, this is as good as F1 has been in forever; probably as good as it will ever get. There is now a month for the teams to cool down, to get back up to pace. Who knows what will emerge at the end of the break? Maybe Fred Vasseur will finally take Ferrari back to the top, or maybe Mercedes will return with the Brawn-esque supremacy their engineering team has always been capable of.
The next two races are swirling storms of storylines. The next racing weekend takes us to Zandvoort, Max Verstappen’s home ground. There have been three races held at Zandvoort this century– he has won them all, of course. He will enter the Dutch GP with momentum, initiative, and home advantage on his side, and we will find out — does Max Verstappen have it in him to win his first competitive championship since 2021? Or will he crumble as he did at the Hungaroring?
After Zandvoort, we go to Monza — the Mecca of F1, the home of Scuderia Ferrari. Forget Mercedes and Red Bull; they are gnats in front of giants. It has been five years since Charles Leclerc won Monza for Ferrari, five years of heartbreak and tantalisingly close losses. In this season of chaos, curse-breaking, and home wins, this is Ferrari’s chance to win a million hearts. This will also likely be the last chance for Norris to establish his credibility as a title challenger, or for the constructors to establish themselves along the pecking order.
With 11 races to go, anything could happen. That’s the beauty of Formula 1.
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