Verstappen Can Clinch the WDC in Vegas, How Did We Get Here?
Max Verstappen After His 2023 Win in Las Vegas
Red Bull’s Max Verstappen currently leads the Formula One World Drivers Championship by 62 points. In a roller coaster of a season where Max’s Red Bull car began its 2024 campaign exactly where it left off in 2023, with wins in five out of the first seven races, and both losses coming through circumstances out of his control (engine failure and unfortunate safety car timing). Yet fast forward to the halfway point of the season, and the future for the once-dominant Milton Keynes manufacturer looked bleak. Sergio Perez’s Red Bull was consistently out of the points, and Verstappen had to put on some fantastic drives to even scrape P4 and P5. When these unusual results piled up for Verstappen, the red flags began to fly. A report came out after the Azerbaijan Grand Prix where Red Bull Team Principal Christian Horner told Auto Motor und Sport: "We traced the development history back, and it turned out that the first mistake we made was with an underbody upgrade in 2023 in Barcelona; that was also the Grand Prix from which Checo started having problems with the car. We just didn’t take it so seriously because Max kept winning.” Seemingly, Verstappen’s ability to dominate regardless of vehicle circumstances had almost come to hurt Red Bull Racing, as they sat in mid-2024, caught as a deer in the headlights of a McLaren.
Amongst all of the Red Bull chaos, McLaren’s duo of Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris had officially arrived. With the help of an undoubtedly dominant car, in the six races from Hungary to Singapore, the duo secured four wins and an insane 221 points. All of a sudden, Lando Norris had his sights set on a title fight with Verstappen’s faltering Red Bull. In fact, after the Singapore Grand Prix, which Lando Norris took by a margin of over 20 seconds, many sportsbooks had the papaya frontman at ~ +100 odds to win the WDC in 2024.
Norris’ #4 Car During the 2024 Singapore Grand Prix
Still, Verstappen’s ability to drive a less-than-ideal car and Norris’ inexperience with a top-tier car seemed to prevail above all. After Singapore, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz combined for a Ferrari 1-2 in Austin, where Verstappen placed on the final podium spot above Lando Norris’ P4 finish despite his pole start. Norris bounced back in Mexico with a second place finish above Verstappen’s third place end. Yet in order for Norris to have a real shot at the WDC, he had to be getting much better margins than the three-point difference between 2nd and 3rd. As the end of the season was in sight, Norris had no room for error in his championship fight. Hope was still alive for Norris though; that was until the Brazilian skies opened up in a torrential downpour. Even after Lando’s pole position start, Verstappen in the rain was inevitable. As many call rain in F1, “the ultimate equalizer,” the driver matters more than any car can. Verstappen took the win in Brazil, and Norris fell to sixth place, all but ending the Brit’s WDC hopes.
Lando Norris now sits at +1600 to win this year's WDC, and Verstappen can clinch his fourth F1 WDC with essentially any finish above Norris. Verstappen needs just two more points than Norris in his Vegas outing to put the nail in the coffin. On the bright side for Norris and McLaren, they are very much in the driver's seat for the Constructors Championship, which is an absolutely massive accomplishment for a team that struggled to be consistently in the points just two years ago. This transformation speaks volumes to the culture that CEO Zak Brown and Team Principal Andrea Stella have built. McLaren’s growth as a constructor has been palpable since early in 2023, and a World Constructors Championship, which would be McLaren’s first since 1998, would be the cherry on top of a fantastic 2024 campaign.
Norris (left), Stella (middle-left), Piastri (middle-right), and Brown (right) celebrate after the Hungarian Grand Prix
As for Verstappen: he looks to crown himself as F1’s 2024 World Drivers Champion in the ultimate racing spectacle: Las Vegas. Verstappen will no doubt soak in the festivities this time around; as McLaren isn’t going away anytime soon.
