The numbers which show this is Max Verstappen’s best championship

After dominating the early rounds, the Dutchman needed resilience and fighting spirit to claim his fourth world title

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By many metrics, Max Verstappen’s 2024 championship victory falls behind his previous three titles. It lacks the tension, drama and controversy of his first in 2021. It struggles to match the relentless quality of both 2022 and 2023, when he won 34 of 44 races.
Verstappen himself described his fourth crown as challenging, while Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said it was the Dutchman’s “best and hardest championship”. It is hard to disagree and the lack of victories and pole positions since late spring bear that out.
After seven wins in the first 10 rounds, Verstappen has taken just one more victory. He has often had the third or fourth-quickest car, yet has seen off a challenge from a resurgent, if flawed, McLaren and Lando Norris.
Digging a bit deeper into numbers, though, gives a greater appreciation for Verstappen’s achievement, as well as how unusual Formula One has been in the past eight months.
The last time a driver won the championship with a car that did not finish in the top two in the constructors’ standings was in 1983, when Nelson Piquet won for Brabham, who finished third overall.
Red Bull trail Ferrari by 29 points and sit in third. With Sergio Perez’s dire form, overhauling them in the final two rounds in Qatar and Abu Dhabi looks unlikely. This would make Verstappen only the third man in F1 history to take the crown in a machine that finished third or worse, after Piquet 41 years ago and Williams’s Keke Rosberg in 1982.
Much of this is because Perez has been almost useless to Red Bull, but there is little doubt that Verstappen has had to contend with often the third and, occasionally, the fourth-fastest car.
“That is a MONSTER of an accident!” 😲A look at the huge crash between Perez and both Haas drivers which caused a red flag – thankfully all three drivers are out of the cars and are fine ✅ pic.twitter.com/Df10hRTSIf
Verstappen has had a drop-off in results since the Miami Grand Prix in May, when McLaren’s upgrade package transformed their car into a race winner. Up to and including Miami, the points-per-round figure was 22.67, but it has since dropped to 16.67.
Despite this, Verstappen still scored more than Norris after this point, getting the most from his car when Norris too frequently did not. Despite McLaren’s rapid progress Norris improved his points-per-round figure after Miami by 2.23  – from 13.83 points to 16.06.
Whilst Verstappen’s results dropped off after Miami, Perez’s decline ruined Red Bull’s hopes of a double championship. After a strong start to the season with 103 points in the first five rounds, the Mexican not only failed to finish on the podium in the following 16 events, but his highest points haul over a weekend was his eight at Zandvoort.
Verstappen’s points total from Imola to Las Vegas is 267, while Perez’s is a measly 49. For comparison, Haas’s Nico Hulkenberg scored 29 points in the same period. In other words, in that time Verstappen has scored 5.44 times as many points as his beleaguered team-mate.
Not since 1983 has a team-mate of a title-winning driver finished as low as eighth at the end of the season, when Riccardo Patrese was ninth to championship-winning Piquet at Brabham. That was, however, in a time of far higher attrition, with the Italian retiring from nine of the 15 rounds that year, compared to Piquet’s four non-finishes.
After winning seven of the first 10 rounds and stretching his championship lead to 69 points over Norris, Verstappen has finished on average off the podium since the Austrian Grand Prix in June. In the first 10 rounds, his average finishing position was 1.67 but in the next 12 that dropped to 3.8 – only slightly worse than Norris (3.36).
His total of two podiums in seven grand prix finishes between Austria and Azerbaijan is also his worst run over any comparable period since 2017, his first full season at Red Bull.
In 2023, Verstappen broke the record for the most consecutive grand prix victories with a perfect run from Miami to Monza. In 2024, though, he endured a winless run of 10 grands prix, stretching from Austria until his superb victory in the rain at Interlagos.
Before that, the last time he went without standing on the top step of the podium for so long was an 11-race run in 2020 – a year when he won just two races.
What Verstappen needs to score in the final two rounds (two grands prix and one sprint race) to overhaul his 2022 championship-winning score.
That season was over two fewer rounds (22 to 24), so the points-per-round differences are 18.31 this year compared to 20.6 in 2022. The record-breaking days of 2023 when Verstappen scored 575 points (26.13 per round) and won 19 of 22 grands prix are a distant memory now.
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