Is Max Verstappen the greatest athlete of all time?
Jack Baruth
Five years ago, Netflix released the first season of its Drive to Survive series, elevating Formula One into the American consciousness and making TV stars out of characters like Haas team principal Guenther Steiner and journeyman driver Daniel Ricciardo. This has not always sat well with veteran stateside followers of the sport, such as your humble author. Why, we woke up at 3 a.m. to watch the races in Asia! We paid outrageous shipping, customs, and foreign transaction fees to wear Europe-only merch from recherche teams like Jordan and Minardi! We sat through the 2005 U.S. Grand Prix, where only six cars started the race, then unhesitatingly bought tickets for 2006, proving that P.T. Barnum was probably too much of a pessimist!
If pressed, however, most of us will agree that the “DTS effect” has been absolutely marvelous for American F1 fans. We now have three races here every year, including this delightful new Las Vegas Grand Prix that cost well over half a billion dollars to put together and which shuts down the Strip for days at a time. That wouldn’t have been possible without the Netflix arrivistes.
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Just as importantly, they’re showing F1 at your favorite sports bar nowadays. People talk about it at work. The fellow ahead of me in the line for Communion last Sunday was wearing a hooded sweatshirt commemorating Lando Norris, the lead driver for McLaren. (He should have started wearing it to church at the beginning of the season; might have done more good.) In an era where stick-and-ball sports are struggling to keep their fans engaged and NASCAR ratings are cratering, F1 is surging. It is now part of the American sporting discussion.
Which is a good thing, because if we are going to really understand Max Verstappen’s absolutely unprecedented 2023 championship with Red Bull, we are going to need a few metaphors from the rest of that discussion. Such as: Verstappen was as reliable as Lou Gehrig, but also as reliably brilliant under pressure as Reggie Jackson. His winning percentage was higher than that of Novak Djokovic, but his margin of victory was more like what you got from 1979’s Alabama Crimson Tide. When it suited him, he played as rough as Marty McSorley, and at 200 mph no less. But when he needed to be, he was as clinical and precise as Bobby Orr.
Yet no highlight-reel mishmash or tortured set of allegories really conveys what happened at Red Bull Racing in 2023. As the third-winningest driver in F1 history, Verstappen’s place among the greats was already assured. But this season was indisputably the finest one ever enjoyed by a racing driver. Period, point-blank, irrespective of era, genre, league, or machine. There has never been anyone better.
How do we know for sure? Because Formula One is critically unlike any other kind of racing in the world. Each of the 10 F1 teams is a constructor. Which means they build their own car, from scratch, wrapping it around a powertrain from Ferrari, Mercedes, Honda, or Renault. From a distance, the cars look similar, but everything from the seating position of the driver to the steering wheel in his hands is unique. You can make the car faster by making it harder to drive, the same way that a modern fighter jet’s remarkable capabilities come from it being aerodynamically outrageous. But the fighter jet is allowed to have a computer between the pilot and the wings. In F1, it’s down to the driver.
That’s where Max Verstappen comes in. His father, Jos Verstappen, was an F1 driver of some distinction. But his mother, Sophie Kumpen, was a kart-racing prodigy who equaled the performance of at least one future F1 world champion and was at one point considered to be an F1 prospect on her own merits. Perhaps as a consequence, Max has extraordinary eyesight. His eyes are set far apart, which is known to help with depth perception. A study of his in-car video once showed that he blinks at about one-third the rate of a normal human.
Verstappen was the youngest driver to ever start an F1 race, and the youngest to ever win one. He set the all-time record for passes in a race back in 2016, and was described by former F1 champion Niki Lauda as “the talent of the century.” In each season since then, he has measurably improved. Which is what allowed Red Bull’s lead car designer, Adrian Newey, to give him a car that is by many accounts more difficult to drive than anything else on the grid. This is not a decision Newey could have made lightly; the tragic death of three-time world champion Ayrton Senna happened in a Newey-designed car. But having Max on the team made it possible.
Which is not to say that everyone approved. Each F1 team has two drivers. Verstappen’s mate, the highly regarded Sergio Perez, frequently struggled with Red Bull this year, often failing to qualify in the top 10 and notching just two wins. Driving the same car under the same conditions, however, Verstappen recorded 44 wins and three consecutive championships, culminating in this unprecedented 2023 season.
The per-season records Max broke in 2023 tell part of the story: most wins, highest percentage of wins, most consecutive wins, first driver in history to lead a thousand laps, most wins from pole position in a season, and most consecutive points scored. In a sport where minor mistakes lead to massive crashes, Verstappen was just the third driver in history to complete every lap of every race during a season.
If you watched the races, however, you saw more. Verstappen thrived in all conditions, from rain to triple-digit heat to the freezing desert in Las Vegas. By the end of the season, his car was obviously weaker in qualifying performance than the Ferrari and McLaren competition, but in the races Verstappen’s ability to execute 50 or 60 near-perfect laps in a row rendered the speed disadvantage irrelevant. Most of his races appeared to be lonely, boring affairs in which he led the field by half a minute or more, yet watching the in-car footage of each lap showed a driver at the absolute limit of possible performance, lap after lap.
When all was said and done, Verstappen had 575 championship points to the 285 points of second-place Perez, giving Red Bull the constructors’ championship as well. The second-place constructor, Mercedes-AMG, had just 409 points from two world-class drivers. Imagine a 2001 season where Barry Bonds hits 73 home runs, while Sosa and Gonzalez combine for 52 in second and third place. Not even Babe Ruth in his prime was that dominant.
Christian Horner, the urbane Red Bull boss who married Geri “Ginger Spice” Halliwell, laconically noted this week that there was “room for improvement” in the 2023 season. That improvement could conceivably happen. But in reality, Verstappen’s 2023 season was so statistically improbable that it is unlikely to repeat. Anything could stop it, up to and including another driver making a random mistake and putting Max out of the race. That doesn’t mean I won’t be glued to my television in 2024, along with the fans who realize they just saw a once-in-a-lifetime performance and all the casual newcomers who probably think that something like this happens every year. Eventually the latter will learn enough F1 lore to realize what they’ve seen. And for those of you who have never seen an F1 race and don’t plan to? I will, however reluctantly, recommend that you watch this season’s Drive to Survive, which debuts in February 2024. If it’s anything like the races it purports to cover, it should be the best one yet.
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Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.