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Max Verstappen is the best driver on the planet. And he should be crowned world champion again this year if justice counted.
That is not meant to be disrespectful to Lando Norris, the British contender, nor Australian Oscar Piastri, his McLaren team-mate who leads the standings by 25 points coming into the humid streets of Singapore this weekend.
They are considerable performers. Norris is extremely fast. Piastri nearly as much so but he may be the more complete. Norris has moments of doubt. Piastri, usually so secure, was to blame for two crashes in Azerbaijan the weekend before last, and a question mark over him is whether those were blips or signs of pressure in his first ever title race.
But against this backdrop, who has been the season’s star performer of the front-running teams? A very strong case can be made for George Russell in an unremarkable Mercedes.
But, talking of the championship, its fringes at least, the answer is Verstappen. This has been demonstrated in a Red Bull that is decent but not at the level of the McLarens. He has been supremely fast, ultra-reliable and, aged 28, at the zenith of his business.
How else could he be just 69 points behind Piastri? ‘Just’ – it’s a lot to be trailing by with seven rounds remaining, plus sprints in Austin, Brazil and Qatar, but it places him on the cusp of immortality. There are 199 points available. So it’s a good chunk.
Max Verstappen's victories in the last two races have catapulted him back into the title race - though it is an outside chance still
Are the signs of pressure beginning to show for Oscar Piastri after his crash in Azerbaijan?
If he were to pull off the title, his presumptive status as the supreme driver of all time would be embellished. Grease-fingered greybeards who saw Juan Manuel Fangio are even conceding that the Dutchman may be the best of the lot. Bernie Ecclestone is among them.
They have curbed a reluctance to acknowledge as much, which was then based on the warrior mistakes Verstappen very occasionally made as a tyro. When he was into a sequence of such errors and I was perplexed why, he was less than amused when I asked him for an explanation. I was genuinely intrigued. I was not being funny.
He snapped back: ‘The next person who asks me that, I’ll headbutt.’ We made up and laughed about it on the boat after he beat Lewis Hamilton, no less, to the title in Abu Dhabi so controversially that night in 2021.
But even in his raw emergence, Verstappen was a remarkable talent then as now, and was gathering a momentum in his career that could never be stopped.
He has four titles to his name, last year’s achieved against the odds. McLaren, with the fastest car from as early as Miami in April, should have borne a champion. It should have been Norris triumphant, but he did not seize the moment of a lifetime.
He did not know it existed. Or pretended he did not. McLaren bosses ruled it out. Zak Brown, the chief executive, was keen to win the constructors’ title, their first since 1998, rather than take the drivers’ crown. Now Brown is mad on winning both drivers’ and constructors’ equally (the latter is a formality). The last time McLaren took the drivers’ prize was through Hamilton in 2008.
But is it a two-horse, all-McLaren race? Norris believes not. ‘He is genuinely a challenger,’ said the Briton of Verstappen, whom he leads by 44 points. ‘If you go back to the beginning of the season they were challenging us for the first six or seven races for wins, and then we brought some upgrades and improved a little.
‘But they brought a couple of upgrades themselves and that puts them on the same level. We are still expecting to dominate, and we come to these races with the goal and ambition of winning, wanting to dominate and continue the form we have shown all season.’
Lando Norris can already feel Verstappen gaining on him in second place in the standings
A fifth title in a row, from a position as far back as he is currently, would surely put Verstappen above even the great Juan Manuel Fangio (centre), the great Argentine of the 1950s
Verstappen’s task is hard but not impossible. Charles Leclerc rated the Dutchman’s chances of taking a fifth title at 20 per cent after his successive wins in Monza and Baku following the upgrade Norris alluded to. What a revival, though achieved at low downforce tracks suited to the Red Bull car. This weekend’s race in Singapore offers a diminished chance to Red Bull, or so the theory goes.
That Verstappen is even vaguely in contention is mostly attributable to his own class in a car he has extracted so much from. An argument underlined by the most astonishingly telling statistic in Formula One history: Verstappen has scored 255 points, while his team-mate Yuki Tsunoda has 20.
Yet, Verstappen still has to score 10 points more than Piastri in every race to prevail. But stranger things have happened. Hamilton lost the title to Kimi Raikkonen under the old scoring system (10 points for a win then rather than the 25 now) back in 2007, having led by 17 points with two races remaining. Sebastian Vettel overhauled significant deficits to win his first and third of four consecutive world titles, in 2010 and 2012 respectively.
While Leclerc said 20 per cent, Verstappen said 50, joking that he either would win it or not – like a coin it will land one side or another. Yet, 50 per cent sounds about right to me, 45 per cent minimum. I backed him at the start of the season before the limitations of his Red Bull were known. I am not ruling him out yet as his car improves, and as others’ knees may wobble.
