LAS VEGAS — “At the moment, both championships are not realistic.”
Max Verstappen’s comment after a miserable Italian Grand Prix, where he’d struggled to sixth place, was delivered with no real anger. More a matter-of-fact frustration.
Despite doing his best and getting the most out of a car that was becoming increasingly hard to drive, Verstappen was in the midst of a 10-race winless run that had allowed McLaren’s Lando Norris to close up in the drivers’ championship. It was still a sizable margin, 62 points, but with no sign of his slide in form stopping, there was a genuine fear the title could slip away.
A few months earlier, it was unfathomable. Verstappen had started the season in the same dominant fashion he had closed out 2023, when he won a record 19 races, and looked set to canter to a fourth title.
But a combination of Red Bull’s car development struggles and a surge in performance from its rivals, McLaren in particular, turned it into a championship he had to really fight for. A very different story to the previous two years.
Verstappen’s coronation on Sunday morning in Las Vegas will be met with a sense of relief. Yes, he is a four-time world champion. But the fashion of this championship win will only add to the case for his standing among F1’s all-time greats, should it require any further justification.
When Verstappen kicked off his title defense with a dominant victory in Bahrain, little attention was paid to the result, the spotlight instead laying on Red Bull’s off-track turbulence.
Team principal Christian Horner faced allegations of inappropriate and controlling behavior from a female employee shortly before Red Bull unveiled its new car, the RB20, in February. Horner always denied the allegations, and the grievance against him was dismissed following an investigation by a King’s Counsel, as was a subsequent appeal in September.
But with Verstappen’s father, Jos, claiming the team would be “torn apart” if Horner remained in charge, and Verstappen himself indicating he could quit if Red Bull’s adviser, Helmut Marko, were to leave after the Austrian faced scrutiny over information leaks, it was clear there was tension off the track.
Verstappen regularly deflected questions about Horner’s leadership by stressing his focus was on performance. All he wanted was a peaceful environment and a quick car. And despite his father’s claims, Red Bull continued to dominate. Verstappen took pole for each of the opening seven races, winning five of them.
This opening sequence of races is where Verstappen laid the foundations for his fourth title. He was close to perfect through this period, pulling into a lead that, combined with the regular demolitions of the field, left Toto Wolff, the Mercedes team principal, to call the championship as early as round four of 20 at Suzuka.
“No one is going to catch Max this year,” Wolff said. “This season now is (about being) best of the rest.”
It was a prediction that ultimately aged very poorly.
The first clues that Norris may become a threat to Verstappen in the championship arrived in China. While Verstappen won again, the display from Norris to finish second indicated he was ready to take the fight to the Dutchman, something he discussed at length with The Athletic around the same time. “When I need to, and the time comes to race him, I 100 percent will,” Norris said. “My time’s coming.”
That chance would arrive in Miami. Armed with a whole car’s worth of upgrades and with a bit of help from a fortuitously-timed safety car, Norris finally scored his breakthrough win. Verstappen had grown so accustomed to winning in the early-season races that, out of habit, he took the winner’s seat in the post-race press conference, only to quickly realize his error and laugh it off.
Verstappen accidentally sat in the middle of the sofa (for the winner!) in the press conference 😂 Quickly realises, “sorry guys!” #F1 pic.twitter.com/5g0fwq0Bi9
— Luke Smith (@LukeSmithF1) May 5, 2024
Norris’s win was no fluke. At Imola, he managed his tires perfectly to mount a late charge to attack Verstappen, who soaked up the pressure and held on to win by less than a second. Monaco exposed the RB20’s slow-speed struggles, resigning him to sixth as Charles Leclerc won for Ferrari before Verstappen’s back-to-back wins in Canada and Spain.
The importance of these two victories cannot be understated. The win in Canada was opportunistic, keeping calm through some late-race, rain-induced chaos. Fighting both Norris and Mercedes’ George Russell, Verstappen could very easily have lost. He didn’t.
The same was true in Spain. Norris attributed his defeat to a bad start from pole position, while an attempt to gain a tire offset ultimately backfired, leaving him a couple of seconds shy at the flag. It nevertheless signaled to Verstappen and Red Bull the severity of the threat to their domination. “We’re having to fight really hard for the wins at the moment,” Horner said after the race. New territory for a team that won the 2024 constructors’ title by 451 points.
Austria proved to be the first major flashpoint in Verstappen and Norris’ title fight when they collided while fighting for the win in the closing stages.
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It was the first time since 2022 that Verstappen had been engaged in a proper wheel-to-wheel fight for the win, and really been made to work for it, rekindling some of his past aggression. Verstappen was penalized for the incident and would finish fifth, but Norris paid the bigger price by retiring. It had been inevitable, yet it still served as a firm reminder to Norris that to beat Verstappen, he’d need to be at the top of his game.
Nothing but perfection would do.
Throughout F1 history, a sign of a great driver comes in their ability to make the best out of a sub-standard car. Over the closing races of the European season, that challenge was put to Verstappen, and met with a near-perfect response.
Even as the balance struggles deepened, leaving Verstappen, a driver who thrives off confidence in the connection between his inputs and the car on the road, to feel powerless against his rivals at points, the points kept coming in. He grabbed P2 at Silverstone and P4 at Spa, beating Norris both times. Despite being on the receiving end of a 20-second defeat to Norris at Zandvoort, for Verstappen to come home second was a considerable achievement. Rarely did he leave points on the table.
Monza was perhaps the only race where Verstappen really looked at risk. But one element that helped his championship bid was the fact his rival was not able to dominate unchecked. Norris couldn’t sweep the races, given the performance of Ferrari and even his own McLaren teammate, Oscar Piastri. The team orders debate was always a tricky one for McLaren to handle, especially as the gap to Verstappen remained so large.
There were definitely missed opportunities through this period. Norris admitted himself ahead of F1’s return from the summer break that he wasn’t driving at the level required to be world champion, having slipped back at Spa on the opening lap. His failure to convert pole position into retaining the lead into Turn 1 until Singapore proved costly, especially at Monza as Ferrari scooped up the win on a weekend when Red Bull was at its weakest.
All the while, Verstappen continued to get the maximum out of his Red Bull. In the seven-race stretch between Spain and Azerbaijan, Norris only made up 10 points on Verstappen in the championship. It was nowhere near the kind of progress he required.
Red Bull knew when it introduced its last major upgrade package of the season at the United States Grand Prix in Austin that a lot was riding on its impact. If Verstappen could not rediscover some of his confidence and feel with the car, and if McLaren did take a step forward, Norris would have a serious chance of overhauling the points gap.
Victory in the Austin sprint race allayed some of Verstappen’s fears. It was only a Saturday win, yet it was celebrated with more enthusiasm than Verstappen had shown for some time. He couldn’t repeat the feat on Sunday as Ferrari swept to a 1-2, leaving Verstappen to scrap with Norris in a battle that ended in controversy. Norris received a penalty for overtaking Verstappen off the track, yet he was unhappy with how the Red Bull driver had defended his position.
It was a sign that Verstappen was still ready to get his elbows out and be aggressive against Norris, something reaffirmed one week later in Mexico when two incidents with Norris on the same lap landed Verstappen 20 seconds worth of penalties. Verstappen looked dimly on the stewards’ call, yet he’d clearly crossed a line.
By now, Norris knew what he was getting into, but again couldn’t maximize the opportunity; Carlos Sainz won for Ferrari, meaning Norris in second only took 10 points out of Verstappen’s lead instead of the maximum 18.
Verstappen delivered the knockout punch in Brazil. Norris had reduced the gap to 44 points thanks to a sprint race win and was on pole for Sunday’s grand prix while Verstappen, who suffered a shock Q2 exit and had to serve a penalty, was 17th. A win with Verstappen failing to score could surely turn the tide in the title fight.
Verstappen responded with the greatest display of his F1 career. In rainy conditions, he charged through to victory, taking the lead at the same moment Norris slid down the order after a mistake at Turn 1. A symbolic moment of the diverging paths of their title aspirations.
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By the time F1 arrived in Las Vegas, all Verstappen had to do was finish ahead of Norris to wrap up the title with two rounds to spare. From the time the lights went out and Verstappen beat Norris out of Turn 1, the race felt like the exclamation point on the statement Verstappen made in Brazil. Verstappen kept his rival behind him the whole race. Although he couldn’t hold on to a podium position, he still cruised to the checkered flag in P5, one spot ahead of Norris, to secure his fourth consecutive world championship.
Verstappen hadn’t fought this hard for a championship since 2021 when he went toe-to-toe with Lewis Hamilton for his maiden title. That was a fraught season that ended a classic title fight in controversy, with then-race director Michael Masi’s fumbling of the rulebook giving Verstappen the chance to overtake Hamilton on the last lap of the last race to clinch the title.
2021 may have been a greater direct challenge for Verstappen, particularly against the might of Hamilton and Mercedes. But 2024 was a tougher championship for him to win.
While Verstappen was able to make good on his vow to focus on performance through the early-season tension at Red Bull, it was unquestionably a distraction. Nor did it fully ease through the year amid recurring links with a shock switch to Mercedes and the high-profile departures of technical guru Adrian Newey to Aston Martin and sporting director Jonathan Wheatley to Audi. At times, Verstappen’s ability to wring the most of the car and keep delivering great performances was a source of certainty.
What made 2024 different from 2021 is that this time, Verstappen was often powerless to fight back against the quicker drivers and teams. The close competitive order meant that on a weekend where Ferrari or Mercedes could perform as well as McLaren, Red Bull would slide further back. It wasn’t like P2 or P3 was a given as it may have been when fighting a single team, though the added competition also prevented Norris from scooping up points to inflict maximum damage on Verstappen when he was weak.
But the greatest reason Verstappen won his fourth championship was his ability to keep making the most of his car, often outstripping its natural performance ceiling, despite the obvious drawbacks. The issues have run so deep that teammate Sergio Pérez hasn’t been on the podium since China, leaving Verstappen to often fight alone. Unlike Norris, he could not rely on a teammate to join him toward the front of the pack.
Verstappen had to defeat stronger competition to win his first title in 2021. But this year, he had to overcome being hamstrung by a car that, for so much of the season, was not capable of winning him races, let alone a title. The adversity was greater.
For Verstappen to now be crowned a four-time champion in spite of that is a testament to his greatness, and why 2024 will go down as one of his greatest successes.
Top photo: Mario Renzi – Formula 1 / Getty Images, Mark Thompson / Getty Images; Design: Kelsea Petersen/The Athletic
