More titles for Verstappen's taking, if Red Bull keeps up with its F1 champ

F1

Max Verstappen has driven beautifully and barely been challenged on his way to a second F1 championship. It won't always be this way, writes Damien Smith, but he looks destined for even more titles

Max Verstappen sits on red armchair after winning the 2022 F1 world championship

Dan Istitene/F1 via Getty Images

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Damien Smith

So, Max Verstappen: two-time world champion. We’ve known it would be this way for months and now, after some brief confusion, it is confirmed. At just 25 years old, the Dutchman joins Alberto Ascari, Graham Hill, Jim Clark, Emerson Fittipaldi, Mika Häkkinen and Fernando Alonso as a double Formula 1 king – but few would bet he’ll be part of this regal club for too long. Verstappen has the F1 world at his feet and, barring some unseen catastrophe, more titles will surely follow, within a pin-sharp Red Bull team that revolves around his every need.

Verstappen has driven beautifully this year, in a manner that has at times carried echoes of Sebastian Vettel’s greatest days at the same team. All that remains is whether he can match and surpass the record of 13 grand prix wins in a single season held jointly by Vettel from 2013 and Michael Schumacher in 2004. Champion with four races left to go and having won 12 of the 18 races run so far in 2022, once more few would bet against it.

Then again, Verstappen and Red Bull have been far from flawless this term. Eight months ago, as F1’s new breed of ground effect cars took their bow in Bahrain, Charles Leclerc and a revitalised Ferrari defeated Verstappen fair and square in a nail-biting duel, before both Red Bulls failed late in the race. Sure, Verstappen bounced back by defeating Leclerc in Saudi Arabia, but after another retirement in Australia and a second win in three for the No16 Ferrari, Max was a full 45 points down – and boy, was he grumpy about it.

Max Verstappen watches smoke pouring from his Red Bull at the 2022 Australian Grand Prix

End of this year's Australian Grand Prix for the defending champion

Clive Mason/Getty Images

Max-Verstappen-watches-Charles-Leclerc-drive-past-after-retiring-from-the-2022-Australian-Grand-Prix

Verstappen watches as Leclerc drives to win Australian GP

Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Charles Leclerc and Max Verstappen side by side in the 2022 Bahrain Grand Prix

Leclerc had the edge in Bahrain. Then Verstappen retired

Clive Rose/F1 via Getty Images

The champion is fully rounded as a platinum-grade performer eight seasons into his F1 career – that much has been clear for the past couple of years. But that temper of his still exists on a hair-trigger. Red Bull’s engineering hierarchy are all too used to mid-session or mid-race public hairdryer treatments from an athlete who demands and expects perfection, from himself and everyone around him. We saw it again in qualifying at Singapore: when Red Bull is perceived to have ‘failed’ him, petulance is the default setting. Some might say that sense of self-entitlement is part of the make-up that separates the very good from the truly great, and there’s probably truth in that. Verstappen is similar to Ayrton Senna in this regard. But while the vitriol and juicy language is manna for the Netflix generation, for some of us it tarnishes a value perhaps considered out of fashion: that of class.

So was this Verstappen’s greatest season yet? In terms of the cold statistics and how quickly he wrapped up his second crown, that is obviously the case. But as we found recently when comparing James Hunt’s 1976 title season with his 1977 defence, comparing performances year to year is largely a subjective exercise given how much changes within the competitive landscape with the turn of a season.

Back in 1994 Schumacher became champion for the first time with Benetton, but in the most tumultuous manner imaginable. The next year, he did it again, but without the doubts of angry controversy. It wasn’t that he drove better in 1995 – Benetton’s then-head of engineering, Pat Symonds, insists Schumacher made the jump from contender to frontline great early in 1994 and just kept it flowing through the next season. It was more a case of the opposition, Damon Hill and Williams, taking care of themselves by dropping the ball through their own mistakes. Parallels to Verstappen across 2021 and ’22 are clear.

Max Verstappen raises his trophy after winning the 2022 Belgian Grand Prix

Verstappen has driven beautifully this year, as challengers have dropped away

Remko de Waal/ANP via Getty Images

This time, the obvious shift was the relative fall from grace for Lewis Hamilton as Mercedes-AMG took itself out of the game. That was an unexpected change in F1’s complexion, leaving Verstappen with a wholly different challenge – and let’s be honest, one that was a deal easier than what he faced in the unforgettably intense cut and thrust of 2021.

Sadly, that’s an implied indictment of Ferrari and Charles Leclerc, who between them failed to sustain their title challenge to Red Bull beyond the spring. The reliability failures lost Leclerc so many points. Victory was in his grasp in Spain and the retirement in Azerbaijan was perhaps the moment when Ferrari properly let Verstappen and Red Bull off the hook. Then there was the string of questionable strategy calls as confidence and belief in its own internal systems appeared to drain as the summer progressed into early autumn.

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Plain and simple, Ferrari as a race team has operated too far below Red Bull’s fully match-fit and famous sharpness. Then again, Leclerc carries some of the responsibility, too. Those unforced errors at Imola and most painfully at Paul Ricard, where he spun out of the lead, were heart-wrenchingly painful and damaging to a driver who is all too aware of his own deficiencies. Leclerc is self-critical to a fault. But, as Johnny Herbert told us in his recent magazine column, there are question marks beyond the driving errors that hang over his leadership qualities, within a team that desperately needs strength of character from those sitting in the cockpits. Which leads us to an awkward contradiction: while Leclerc’s grace and diplomacy are admirable in those moments when Ferrari reliability or strategy incompetence has let him down – especially in contrast to Verstappen’s ugly ire – perhaps he needs to take a leaf from his rival next year and beyond, and impose himself with greater force to trigger the change that is so obviously required. Imagine how Verstappen would deal with such failings were he in the Ferrari this year. Something would have broken long before now in the wake of the ensuing nuclear-level explosions – and perhaps that would have been for the best.

Charles Leclerc walks away after finishing 4th in the 2022 British GP

Too laid-back? Leclerc doesn’t appear to take his team to task in the same way as Leclerc

DPPI

When everything is singing in tune, Leclerc has proven he can match and beat Verstappen wheel to wheel (again, Bahrain is the example). But even if he and Ferrari had maintained their challenge deeper into the summer, this would likely have been a rivalry that would have lacked the bitter edge that existed last year between Verstappen and Hamilton, Red Bull and Mercedes. Verstappen and Leclerc are the same age and have known and raced against each other since their karting days. Hamilton is 12 years older and the established target to aim for, creating a wholly different dynamic. You also get the feeling that on a personal level Verstappen and Hamilton will never quite see eye to eye.

A marked contrast in the champion’s driving from 2021 is the dearth of the old characteristic no-compromise moves, largely because he hasn’t been pushed to that point of no return, as he was on occasion last year. As one former F1 driver told me recently, “The difference this season is his principle challenger is not Lewis. He seemed to take a different approach with Lewis last year, which is almost Senna-esque: I’ll never concede, I’ll never concede, I’ll never concede. Whereas this time he’s had a wholly more mature approach to racing with Leclerc and there’s never been a moment when it looks like there will be a huge accident.”

So what comes next? If Mercedes recovers its lost ground over the winter, as we might expect, that competitive landscape will drift once again and in a potentially seismic manner. Hamilton and George Russell fully in the mix with Red Bull and Ferrari is a tasty proposition that could test Verstappen in a manner that has been sorely lacking in this anti-climax of a season. How will his temper stand the strain?

Beyond 2023 and through the rest of the decade, just how many titles Verstappen can accrue will fall largely on Red Bull’s faith in its own technical strength proving well founded. Let’s take a moment to pause and consider: here is a fiercely independent team that has spurned the financial security and technical might of Porsche – Porsche – to back its own newly built Milton Keynes engine plant and its admirably effective sponsor-gathering commercial department to power it through the next decade. That’s with or without the support of a potentially returning Honda, which proved such an effective engine partner last time, without threatening the day-to-day control of the team’s destiny. Rejecting Porsche? Talk about self-belief. But is it a sliding doors call that Red Bull and specifically Verstappen might live to regret? How that one is answered will prove the key to shaping the team’s future results and that of its fierce and wonderfully talented muse.

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