Formula 1 world championship number four is now in the bag for Max Verstappen – but is it his best title yet?
There’s some pretty stiff competition given his first title in 2021 was the result of one of the greatest championship battles ever and he was record-breakingly dominant in 2023.
Here’s what Verstappen and Red Bull think as well as his rivals, and The Race’s team.
Verstappen and Red Bull’s verdict
Verstappen was asked whether this was his most impressive title-winning season in his own one-man FIA champion’s press conference, having sealed his fourth title with a fifth-place finish in the Las Vegas Grand Prix.
“I think so,” Verstappen replied. “Last year, I had a dominant car, but I always felt that not everyone appreciated what we achieved as a team, winning 10 in a row.
“Of course our car was dominant, but it wasn’t as dominant as people thought it was. That’s for sure my best season [2023]. I will always look back at, it because even in places where maybe we didn’t have the perfect set-up, we were still capable, because in the race our car was always quite strong, to win.
“But I’m also very proud of this season because for most of the season, I would say for 70% of the season, we didn’t have the fastest car, but actually we still extended our lead.”
Emotionally 2021 will understandably never be beaten.
“Every championship has actually been very different in emotions,” Verstappen said.
“It will never top the emotions of the first one because that is what you set out to do and that’s your ultimate dream and goal, to win one.
“This season has been very different to the second one and last year’s one. And that’s I think very beautiful – because if they’re all fairly similar, that’s not as exciting.
“Honestly when I crossed the line, I was just very relieved. I was like, it’s over. It’s been a tough run of races, and I’m very happy that it rained in Brazil.”
Red Bull team boss Christian Horner called 2024 “the toughest together with 2021” and says Verstappen has been “head and shoulders the best driver on the grid this year”.
He also drew attention to the job Verstappen has done out of the car this year versus previous title triumphs.
“Behind the scenes, he was putting a massive amount of effort in with the engineers and designers and on the simulator, more than in any of the previous years,” Horner explained.
“The way he’s worked with the engineers and all the technical staff has been phenomenal.”
The Race’s verdict
Scott Mitchell-Malm: This has been Verstappen’s best title.
2021 was the hardest. It was the first championship bid, up against Lewis Hamilton at his peak, and came down to a single deciding race – a race Hamilton would have won without the way it was handled by FIA race director Michael Masi.
Despite that ending, and also Verstappen’s loss of control with some of his driving during the run-in, I think the way Verstappen performed that season made him a worthy world champion. But he’s got better since then. And it’s indisputable he was the best driver in 2024.
He was already the last couple of years, too. But like all champions with the best car, he didn’t get the credit he deserved in 2022 and 2023. This year he’ll find it easier to receive his flowers.
And there’s no denying that overcoming some of the hurdles of 2024 represents a greater achievement, even if it was less satisfying or enjoyable for Verstappen and Red Bull to do it this way.
Megan Cantle: It depends on what your definition of ‘best title’ is. If it includes record-breaking, complete domination and winning 10 races in a row, then 2023 is his best title. But if it’s more in line with dealing with multiple drivers challenging for victories and a car that hasn’t been the strongest every weekend, and just ruthless consistency when others have had blips, then you can’t look past this year.
But even having said all of that, a title that is effectively sealed with a performance as good as Brazil really could be anyone’s best. However you define it, it’s undeniable that 2024 has been a special season for Verstappen.
Ben Anderson: His first was probably the hardest, but I’d argue this one was probably his best – simply because Red Bull weren’t at theirs.
The car was definitely the class of the field up to Miami; thereafter it was a mixed bag. Red Bull has been out-gunned by McLaren and Ferrari’s stronger development this season, and although that headstart was crucial, this feels more than the others a championship where Verstappen made the difference.
It’s usually the case that you see the very best of the very best drivers when their backs are against the wall and they have a proper fight on their hands. Verstappen’s ability to extract better results than the car probably deserved as the competition got stronger made this championship far more straightforward than it otherwise might have been.
It also makes him more essential than ever to Red Bull’s fight to reshape F1’s changed competitive landscape back in its own favour. Red Bull simply cannot do without him.
Matt Beer: Bar Mika Hakkinen’s relatively brief peak and Fernando Alonso’s greatest Renault (first time around) years, I always felt like however excited we got about another driver or whatever blips there were, Michael Schumacher was just inarguably a class apart from everyone else on the grid during the decade covering his title wins and fights. Other drivers taking shots at him could be very entertaining but even if you weren’t a Schumacher fan you had to accept he was the best.
It’s not yet been clear if we were living through that again with Verstappen right now or if this more like the early/mid 2010s ‘multi-great’ era of Alonso, Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton overlapping at their best and dominant cars being the main influence on the title tallies.
The number of rising stars landing in F1 in the late 2010s made it look like we’d be in for a repeat of that. Now I’m not so sure.
Verstappen winning this title at a car disadvantage, through absolute doggedness and with this level of team-mate obliteration puts a lot of pressure on the likes of Charles Leclerc, Lando Norris, Oscar Piastri, George Russell and Kimi Antonelli to prove themselves over the next few years.
Glenn Freeman: McLaren seems satisfied that 2024 has taught it a lot about how to fight for a drivers’ championship next year. But the same applies to Verstappen.
Max has just won his fourth championship in a completely different way to the previous three. He’s banked experience of how to get the maximum out of weekends where his car puts him on the back foot and, to quote his engineer Gianpiero Lambiase, he’s learned that he “doesn’t have to be winning every single thing every single weekend”.
Verstappen got this one over the line the hard way. OK, in 2025 he won’t have a points gap built up that he can protect, but in a title battle where multiple teams and drivers could be taking points off each other every weekend, Verstappen has already proven he will leave very few scraps on the table for the rest.
Charley Williams: His season lacked the on-track controversies of ’21 and the dominance of ’22 and ’23 – but is without a doubt Max Verstappen’s most impressive title-winning campaign yet.
While I think he owes much of this championship to the opening rounds of the season where it felt like we’d hit rewind back to the start of 2023, his ability to push a faltering Red Bull to its limits has been simply astonishing to witness and his win in Brazil embodied all of that – a deserving champion can win when the car is the quickest, and maximise the result when it isn’t.
Gary Anderson: In reality this is the first truly drivers’ world championship Max has actually won. Yes, it’s number four but the other three – or at least 2022/23 – to a big extent came from car domination.
This year he has had to fight for it, very seldom did he actually have the car to win. When he did have it, he won – but the other races were a battle for the best points available. If you need proof of that, you just have to look at his performance against Sergio Perez.
As the saying goes ‘when the going gets tough, the tough get going’.
Josh Suttill: He had a weaker title antagonist in Norris this year versus 2021-spec Hamilton but really Red Bull’s performance crisis was the obstacle very few other drivers in the history of the sport would have been able to overcome, not least doing so with two rounds still to go.
2024-spec Verstappen wraps up the ’21 title before Abu Dhabi, too.
Rivals’ verdict
Verstappen has long earned the respect of his peers with common praise from his rivals – with his defeated title rival Lando Norris summing it up well.
“He’s deserved it. He’s not put a foot wrong, really, the whole year. So that’s a strength of his, he has no downsides. He has no negatives,” Norris said.
“When he’s had the quickest car he dominated races, when he’s not at the quickest car, he’s still been just behind us and almost winning the races anyway.
“You can’t fault him anywhere.”
At the same time, Norris still thinks Verstappen “had a relatively easy season” and believes he’d have made more mistakes had McLaren put him under more pressure earlier in the season.
Norris’s team boss Andrea Stella believes “this title confirms that Max is one of the best drivers in the history of Formula 1” while Ferrari’s Fred Vasseur labelled It an “incredible performance”.
Verstappen’s former arch-nemesis Lewis Hamilton said: “He’s done a fantastic job. He’s not made any mistakes and he’s delivered every time and every point he’s supposed to.
“Him and his team have done the best job, again, fourth year in a row.”
Nico Hulkenberg said: “What a guy. He’s just so strong. So quick all the time, regardless of the temperature or the conditions. Hardly makes any mistakes. And, you know, always just maximises what he can, even if he doesn’t have the winning car or the best car. Just huge respect for that, and many-many congratulations to him, he did incredibly well again.”
Two-time world champion Fernando Alonso even said there are “always things to learn from a driver like him in these kinds of performances this year”.
