Is Verstappen the GOAT? Four-time champ now among F1’s greats
Credit to Author: Nate Saunders| Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2024 16:00:36 EST
Hear from four-time F1 world champion Max Verstappen after the Red Bull driver sealed his latest title in Las Vegas. (0:40)
LAS VEGAS — After securing his fourth world championship at the age of just 27, Max Verstappen has firmly entered Formula 1‘s greatest of all time debate.
He is now in exalted company. Only Juan Manuel Fangio, Alain Prost, Michael Schumacher, Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton had won four championships. Verstappen’s next goal is to join Fangio, Schumacher and Hamilton as a winner of five — if he did it next year, he would emulate Schumacher in winning five consecutively.
The Dutchman’s record-breaking 2023 season had already firmly established this decade as the Verstappen Era, but his follow-up in 2024 was special for a number of reasons.
Verstappen won seven of the first 10 races, seeming ready to cruise to his fourth title before Red Bull’s campaign began to crumble, with an increasingly erratic car, turmoil behind the scenes and the rise of McLaren in the middle of the season. This was when Verstappen showed his mettle, though, extracting important performances from the car at every weekend and then turning in the drive of drives in the pouring rain in the São Paulo Grand Prix to move himself to the brink.
That Interlagos performance, which saw him race from 17th on the grid to victory, was a feather in the cap. F1’s other candidates for the GOAT also have had career-defining performances in similar conditions: three-time world champion Ayrton Senna, considered by many to be F1’s greatest ever, had Monaco 1984 and Donington 1992; Schumacher had Spain 1996; and Hamilton had Silverstone 2008.
Verstappen’s career now checks multiple boxes. A title against another all-time great, Hamilton, in 2021. Two dominant seasons in an unmatched car. And now a championship with a car that you can consider to have been inferior for much of the season.
Few drivers can point to all three of those types of championship-winning campaigns, and that is why 2024 has been so significant to Verstappen’s legacy.
Dominant Formula 1 winners always have to deal with the suggestion that they are the benefactors of a great car. If that were the case, teams like Red Bull would pay average drivers a lot less money than they are paying Verstappen. There is a reason teams always want a superstar driver.
This subject is something that has irked Verstappen recently. He took a playful (but clearly thought-out) jab at McLaren CEO Zak Brown, who earlier this year claimed seven or eight current drivers could win the title in the Dutchman’s Red Bull. Verstappen went on to claim he could have won it even earlier if he were driving Brown’s McLaren, which doubled up as a dig at title rival Lando Norris.
“Last year I had a dominant car but I always felt not everyone appreciated what we achieved as a team. Of course the car was dominant, but it wasn’t as dominant as people thought it was,” Verstappen said in Las Vegas. “I will always look back at it because, even if in places we didn’t have the best setup in the races, we were still capable to win races because the car was quite strong. But I am also very proud of this season because for most of it — I would say for 70% — we didn’t have the fastest car, but actually we still extended our lead, so that is something I am very proud of.”
Fans and pundits can get into the weeds of who had the best car where until the end of time, but Verstappen is right to say his car did not look like a title-winning one for much of the year. Norris has been criticised for failing to properly use the strength of his McLaren at various points in the season, and it was that contrast to Verstappen that proved most telling.
Another mark of the new four-time world champion’s greatness can be seen by looking at the other side of the Red Bull garage. Much has been made of Sergio Pérez‘s abysmal form in the second RB20, but plenty within the team feel the car is likely somewhere between his and Verstappen’s performances; there is a suggestion that one driver is overperforming and the other is underperforming. Verstappen’s reputation as a teammate killer is well founded and is built on his incredible ability to drive just about anything beyond the limits of what other drivers might be able to. That’s why 2024 felt like the cherry on top of his achievements so far: he wasn’t just beating a teammate to the title, he was battling an erratic car against quickly improving rivals.
At this stage, it’s hard to imagine Verstappen retiring as just a four-time world champion. McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes will take renewed hope of challenging for the drivers’ title in 2025, but this season has demonstrated that Verstappen is the driver to beat, regardless of where his car is in the competitive order.
While his race craft has been questioned at times this year — something that was true of other GOAT candidates, including Senna and Schumacher — it is difficult to find times when Verstappen has made unforced errors. Most worryingly of all for his rivals is that, in the decade since he made his debut as a 17-year-old, he appears to have gained the wisdom to settle for second, fourth or sixth when he needs to.
Assigning GOAT status to anyone is circumstantial and subjective and often suffers from recency bias. Some sports have obvious candidates for how they completely reshaped the game they played, like Michael Jordan. Some were utterly unmatched by their peers, like Serena Williams or Wayne Gretzky. Others, like Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, divide opinion but stand alone in the argument. While it is always difficult and slightly unfair to compare different eras, with standards of play and professionalism improving with every decade that passes, Formula 1 has an added layer of complexity to it.
The best example of this is to compare the greats of today with Fangio, the legend of the 1950s. The Argentine won five championships for four different teams in an era when a season would span fewer than 10 races — the 2024 season will finish at 24. But there were more glaring differences as well.
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Fatality rates in F1 races during Fangio’s day were awful, and that fact hung over drivers every time they stepped into the cockpit. That is not to say the same danger does not exist today, but safety standards have improved massively. The stats show that to be the case: 15 F1 drivers died in the 1950s, 14 in the 1960s, 12 in the 1970s, four in the 1980s and two in the 1990s. Jules Bianchi’s death in 2015, from injuries sustained at the previous year’s Japanese Grand Prix, remains the only one this millennium.
Improved safety is not something to hold against modern drivers; it simply complicates trying to compare a Verstappen or Hamilton with someone of Fangio’s era.
There are many who saw Jim Clark race in the 1960s who felt he was the greatest ever. The Scot was killed in a Formula 2 race in 1968 as a two-time F1 champion but at the time of his death held the record for wins, pole positions and fastest laps. Enzo Ferrari considered Gilles Villeneuve, who died at the 1982 Belgian Grand Prix having not managed to win a title, as the best driver he ever saw race one of his famous cars. Senna is revered as one of the greatest, but his death at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix stopped any chance of him adding to his three championships.
The darker side of motor racing makes an easy debate on the topic difficult to have.
It is not just the deaths, either. While the basic rules of a soccer game and the dimensions of a pitch have remained the same, Formula 1 is an ever-evolving championship. Rules change, cars change, safety standards change, even the circuits change.
Technology’s continued, rapid evolution is what allows the sport to change as often as it does. Senna, Prost and Schumacher raced in a time with limited data available to them. Drivers today have an almost-unbelievable amount of information at their fingertips: insights into their own performance and those of their teammates and rivals. You could use that to knock the modern generation, but there is a flip side to that.
Hear from four-time F1 world champion Max Verstappen after the Red Bull driver sealed his latest title in Las Vegas.
The modern batch of F1 racers compete in an era of significantly limited testing; gone are the days when Schumacher and Ferrari could travel home from a race and complete 300 laps the following day at the Fiorano test track in Maranello. The current budget cap has added another layer of difficulty drivers of old simply did not have to deal with: power units need to be managed to stretch over a long season, rather than dropping in a freshly built engine ahead of each grand prix, and crashes can now have a direct impact on what can be invested in development.
The more you pull at the threads of different factors over the years, the more complicated it becomes to assign the “greatest” status to anyone.
The outright greatest will always be subjective and often can be limited to whether you saw particular drivers competing at their best, but Verstappen is doing something few before him have done and is raising the bar every year he competes. There might even be greater talents on the horizon, but, like Schumacher and Hamilton before him, Verstappen continues to move the goalposts they’ll be tasked with reaching
Verstappen is also good enough that, in a few years, there might not even be a debate left to have.
He has repeatedly spoken about not wanting to race into his late 30s, but in the here and now, he goes into 2025 as the favourite. Whether he is still racing with Red Bull in 2026 or beyond will be a fascinating narrative to follow in the coming seasons, and it is clear the best route to success for any team right now is to have Verstappen in the cockpit. That isn’t going to change any time soon.