When 17-year-old Max Verstappen peeled out of the Suzuka pit lane for the very first time in a Formula 1 car back in 2014, those who had seen what he could do in the junior categories suspected they might be witnessing the beginning of a glittering F1 career.
In 2022, that prodigious talent returned to the track his Formula 1 story began almost 3,000 days earlier to cement his place among the undisputed greats of the sport by sealing his second world drivers’ championship title. Unfortunately for Verstappen and his loved ones assembled at the circuit, he would win the race, but he would not secure his second world title.
Until, that is, he did.
The events that unfolded throughout the 2022 Japanese Grand Prix which resulting in Max Verstappen being declared world champion for the second successive season were complex, confusing and, at times, deeply concerning. But remarkably, they all had very little to do with the champion himself.
For only the fifth time this season, Verstappen had earned the luxury of starting from pole position. Fittingly, the only driver who had consistently been able to offer any kind of challenge to the Red Bull driver’s supremacy – Charles Leclerc – sat alongside him on the grid. Heavy rain had arrived from the east overnight and refused to ease up over the course of the day. As the teams began to set up on the grid to prepare their cars for the start, any question of ‘will the rain come?’ had evolved into ‘will the rain stop?’.
As the puddles sitting along the Suzuka circuit rippled with rain, Verstappen, Leclerc and 17 other opponents pulled off the grid on intermediate tyres on the Formation Lap for a rare standing start on a wet track. Only Pierre Gasly’s AlphaTauri did not join them after being banished to start from the pit lane.
When the lights went out, Verstappen and Leclerc pulled off their grid slots in tandem as the entire field of Formula 1 cars behind them vanished in a plume of spray. In a visual metaphor for how the season itself had unfolded, Leclerc got the better start of the two and pulled his nose ahead of Verstappen on the run down the hill to turn one only for Verstappen to break Ferrari’s hopes by charging around the outside to emerge with the lead.
As the pack wound through the Esses and up the hill for the first time, drivers were having to rely on almost supernatural senses to navigate through the intense spray virtually blinding…
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