LAS VEGAS — After securing his fourth world championship at the age of just 27, Max Verstappen has firmly entered Formula 1‘s greatest of all time debate.
He is now in exalted company. Only Juan Manuel Fangio, Alain Prost, Michael Schumacher, Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton had won four championships. Verstappen’s next goal is to join Fangio, Schumacher and Hamilton as a winner of five — if he did it next year, he would emulate Schumacher in winning five consecutively.
The Dutchman’s record-breaking 2023 season had already firmly established this decade as the Verstappen Era, but his follow-up in 2024 was special for a number of reasons.
Verstappen won seven of the first 10 races, seeming ready to cruise to his fourth title before Red Bull’s campaign began to crumble, with an increasingly erratic car, turmoil behind the scenes and the rise of McLaren in the middle of the season. This was when Verstappen showed his mettle, though, extracting important performances from the car at every weekend and then turning in the drive of drives in the pouring rain in the São Paulo Grand Prix to move himself to the brink.
That Interlagos performance, which saw him race from 17th on the grid to victory, was a feather in the cap. F1’s other candidates for the GOAT also have had career-defining performances in similar conditions: three-time world champion Ayrton Senna, considered by many to be F1’s greatest ever, had Monaco 1984 and Donington 1992; Schumacher had Spain 1996; and Hamilton had Silverstone 2008.
Verstappen’s career now checks multiple boxes. A title against another all-time great, Hamilton, in 2021. Two dominant seasons in an unmatched car. And now a championship with a car that you can consider to have been inferior for much of the season.
Few drivers can point to all three of those types of championship-winning campaigns, and that is why 2024 has been so significant to Verstappen’s legacy.
Dominant Formula 1 winners always have to deal with the suggestion that they are the benefactors of a great car. If that were the case, teams like Red Bull would pay average drivers a lot less money than they are paying Verstappen. There is a reason teams always want a superstar driver.
This subject is something that has irked Verstappen recently. He took a playful (but clearly thought-out) jab at McLaren CEO Zak Brown, who earlier this year claimed seven or eight current drivers could win the title in the Dutchman’s Red Bull. Verstappen went on to claim…
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