Why F1 has an awkward problem with Max Verstappen, Red Bull’s dominant world champion

Max Verstappen is assembling one of the great Formula One seasons. So it seems almost rude to ask: is the dominance of Red Bull’s dual world champion bad for the sport?

Max Verstappen is streeting the field in his bid for a third consecutive F1 world championship. Picture: ANP via Getty Images

Is Max Verstappen a bad thing for Formula One? It seems an almost rude question to ask of a man who has two world titles to his name, is streaking away to a third, has won 11 of this year’s 13 races and has just equalled Sebastian Vettel’s record of nine consecutive grand prix victories.

Nor is it a question that you would have posed anywhere in the vicinity of Zandvoort at the weekend, when the vast majority of the 105,000 fans who packed into the Dutch Grand Prix venue were rooting for their local hero. The list of great Dutch F1 drivers is not a particularly long one, so the Max bandwagon is one they have been happy to jump on. In their eyes, he can do no wrong.

In purely sporting terms, they probably have a point. With nine races left, it is already clear that Verstappen, 25, is assembling one of the great F1 seasons. He will almost certainly have the title sewn up well before its end, and when the curtain comes down in Abu Dhabi in November he will have a heap of records against his name.

There are those, of course, who will resent every one of them. Some, perhaps, because Verstappen can appear frosty or even spiky in public; more, almost certainly, for the way he was anointed world champion in 2021 – even if it was the consequence of a gruesome error by a race director rather than anything he or his Red Bull team had done.

Max Verstappen’s RB19 powers through the rain to win the F1 Grand Prix of The Netherlands at Circuit Zandvoort. Picture: Lars Baron/Getty Images

Others, a growing number it would seem, are finally prepared to recognise that Verstappen is one of the great drivers of all time, one whose name will come to be mentioned alongside those of Jim Clark, Juan Manuel Fangio, Michael Schumacher, Ayrton Senna and all the other giants of the sport. Yes, he is blessed to be in a team that appear incapable of making a single strategy error and he has the benefit of a car designed by the legendary Adrian Newey, but even with all those advantages – to which he can add an immersion in motorsport almost from the time he could walk – Verstappen still rises above.

So why should there be any reservations about what he is doing? Because, put simply, by destroying his rivals, he is undermining the competition as a whole. Toto Wolff, the Mercedes team principal, is at pains to make it clear that he has no bitterness (at least not any more) towards Verstappen and Red Bull, and stresses that others simply have to step up to the plate, but he recognises the drawback of having one man dominate F1.

“Unpredictability is what makes the sport exciting,” Wolff said on Saturday. “You want to watch television on a Sunday and see a fight, but that’s not the case at the moment. It’s not happening because one team and one driver are doing a much better job than anyone else. We need to acknowledge that.”

As he spoke, my mind went back to a conversation with Wolff in Austria a couple of months ago. He was recalling the time when his Mercedes team were the dominant force in F1, when Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg looked unbeatable. As they clocked up the wins, Wolff took less and less pleasure from their success. Even the tradition of posing for a team photograph after a victory began to feel as if it was a chore he could live without.

Max Verstappen lifts yet another winner’s trophy at the Dutch F1 Grand Prix. Picture: AFP

As the Red Bull chief, Christian Horner, has observed, convergence is the norm in a technology-driven sport. One team gain an advantage, and little by little the others gnaw away at it. Will that be the process that leads to the downfall of the Red Bull/Verstappen empire? Or will they fall away through complacency, sated by all their success?

At a more prosaic level, the raft of technical changes that are due to be introduced in 2026 will be a significant game-changer. Theoretically, they could level the playing field, as all teams have to start with a clean sheet. Horner, unsurprisingly, has sounded decidedly cool about the sport’s direction of travel, but nobody expects Red Bull to fall off a cliff when the new rules come into play.

Not least because they have Verstappen under contract until 2028. The measure of the driver’s excellence is not only in the way he wins, but his margin of superiority over his teammate, Sergio Perez. On a good day, the Mexican can give Verstappen a run for his money, but there haven’t been many of those this year. He is 138 points adrift of the Dutchman in the championship.

“It’s odd,” Wolff said. “Checo [Perez] is not an idiot. We have seen it over the years that Checo is a grand prix winner, a multiple winner. I cannot comprehend.”

One suggestion is that Perez’s confidence has deserted him. Another is that Red Bull have designed a car around Verstappen’s particular driving style and although its parameters can be adjusted it is fundamentally not one that suits Perez.

Or we could conclude that Verstappen is just a much better driver. And maybe the sport should be grateful for that.

– The Times

Originally published as Why F1 has an awkward problem with Max Verstappen, Red Bull’s dominant world champion