The Hamilton trend Verstappen needs to emulate to see off Norris

OPINION: Max Verstappen still has a healthy points lead in the 2024 Formula 1 world championship, but momentum is now with title rival Lando Norris. As the season now exits a mini-break following the Singapore Grand Prix, here’s how Verstappen replicating his 2021 rival's former trend in such circumstances can make a fourth successive crown certain

Can a driver with a 52-point lead and six rounds of a Formula 1 season remaining really not be considered the favourite to win the world championship?

To many observers, the Dutchman's current points pile and cracking capabilities combine to make him unstoppable in 2024. This is regardless of how good McLaren and Lando Norris were in winning commandingly in Singapore last time out, or the fact that Max Verstappen and Red Bull haven't won since Spain in June.

But Verstappen's position remains precarious.

For a start, the momentum is firmly with McLaren now. When you add Norris’s similarly crushing Zandvoort win to what he achieved in Singapore (and surely should’ve done at Monza), that’s two from the last four races in 2024’s mini-post-summer break phase of the campaign where the title chaser has delivered wins worthy of Verstappen’s brilliant start to this season.

Verstappen hopes – saying in Singapore that “we are moving in the right direction now”– that Red Bull is over the worst of the car problems that have held it back really since Miami in early May. But even if the work the team has been putting in of late does draw it back level with McLaren around an eagerly anticipated Austin upgrade package, Verstappen is still at risk of just a single DNF blowing this title fight wide open given how many races there are still to come at this stage.

Verstappen’s record in these – Austin, Mexico, Brazil, Las Vegas, Qatar and Abu Dhabi – is, overall, formidable.

At both the Circuit of the Americas and the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, Verstappen is undefeated since they rejoined the F1 calendar after the COVID-19 pandemic. His wins at these tracks in 2021 were critical in eventually winning his first world title that year.

His past is chequered in Brazil. He has two wins, but Interlagos is also a track where he lost a certain victory in that bizarre clash with Esteban Ocon in 2018, then in 2021 Hamilton roared back (boosted by a fresh engine but still with more to lose in a collision from his grid penalty recovery) and famously won. The next year, any hope Verstappen had of winning in spite of Red Bull’s tyre trouble was undone in another crash with Hamilton, before his refusal to help Sergio Perez over minor places played out late on.

He has a 50:50 record in Qatar – losing to Hamilton in 2021 before winning on the track’s second GP last year. Verstappen did, however, lose the 2023 Qatar sprint race to Oscar Piastri and of all the remaining races this is the one where McLaren must be considered the overwhelming victory favourite given its high-speed nature.

Las Vegas is another outlier and Ferrari will surely be strong with its ‘Monza special’ rear wing and McLaren no longer running its ‘mini-DRS’ that made headlines in Baku.

Verstappen won the first race with Vegas back on the calendar in 41 years, but really, Charles Leclerc should’ve taken victory but for his misfortune (and Verstappen’s gain) around the mid-race safety car.

At the Abu Dhabi season finale, Verstappen’s form is sensational – he has won every year since 2019 and hasn’t finished off the podium at the Yas Marina track since he was fifth there in 2017.

There is, however, a rather glaring asterisk from that 2021 Abu Dhabi race, as Verstappen was seemingly well beaten by Hamilton before the officiating saga that followed Nicholas Latifi’s late crash.

Yet, three years later, Verstappen can surely draw inspiration from his 2021 title rival ahead of this final bout of contests against Hamilton’s former team, McLaren. This is how on several occasions through his title steamrollering years with Mercedes, Hamilton often turned the screw on threatening opposition with a series of pivotal, successive victories.

In 2014, his five wins in a row after that controversial clash with Nico Rosberg at Spa overturned his team-mate’s once hefty points lead. In 2016, having allowed Rosberg to build momentum with three walk-off wins at the end of 2015, his season-closing four successive wins couldn’t overturn the damage of points lost to several bad starts and that Malaysian GP engine failure that year, but it meant Rosberg couldn’t be sure of the title until the final Abu Dhabi tour.

In 2017, Hamilton came out of the summer break with five wins from six races – Ferrari and Sebastian Vettel his closest challenger (and ahead in the points before this streak started). This was where Hamilton’s trait of hammering critical points of the season really took on a new dimension, given for the first time in its title run Mercedes was having to deal with what Toto Wolff called a “diva” car.

Perhaps most significantly here, because as for Verstappen in 2024, 2018 was really not a season where Hamilton regularly had the clear best car package. But he produced another four-race post-Spa/summer break victory streak that snapped any faint hopes Vettel had of wresting back control of the championship. Again, the German had led Hamilton in the standings – until that infamous home off at Hockenheim.

Hamilton usually rose when the pressure was highest during his title run and, as Austin and Mexico 2021 showed, Verstappen can do this too – although that is the only season he has really had to work for a title and it came with plenty of controversial moments that could be argued as unresolved weaknesses too. Nevertheless, such rising at critical moments is a trait that separates the great from the good in F1 driver history.

Of course, that current 52-point gap to Norris can’t be forgotten. More often, a driver that has built a critical early points lead will get over the line – with famous examples such as Ayrton Senna for McLaren in 1991, Renault’s Fernando Alonso in 2005 and Jenson Button with Brawn GP in 2009.

So, if Verstappen can pull out a winning streak at this critical moment now in 2024 – starting on what must be considered favourable ground at Austin and in Mexico given his recent records at those tracks – he can make certain of matching Hamilton and Vettel (and Michael Schumacher and Juan Manuel Fangio) in securing four F1 titles in succession.