F1 needs Verstappen to rile and push Hamilton
➤ Feisty Dutchman finally has the car to challenge the champion and create rivalry the sport is crying out for
It is an awkward truth about the Lewis Hamilton era at Mercedes that the most memorable title race, by far, was the one he lost. He was driven to distraction by Nico Rosberg’s superiority in 2016, openly questioning his team-mate’s mental resilience and erupting in fury when several of his mechanics were transferred to the other side of the garage. An air of cordite hung over every twist of that season, from the duelling stars’ opening-lap crash in Barcelona to Hamilton’s almost sackable offence in backing his rival into the chasing pack at the Abu Dhabi finale.
Even once-jaded fans loved it, and so, as is the way of Formula One, Mercedes stopped it. “As a team principal, it was almost impossible to manage the animosity,” admitted Toto Wolff. “We, as a team, cannot let it happen again.”
While Rosberg’s decision to retire to his second home in Ibiza was beneficial for his tan, it was wounding to his sport, depriving it of a driver who could not only unsettle Hamilton but outperform him consistently in the same machinery. As his replacement, Wolff chose Valtteri Bottas, a figure so well-drilled in his role as understudy that when the team ordered him to allow Hamilton through for victory in Sochi in 2018, he reacted with barely a shrug.
Bottas is such a difficult figure to glamorise that even Netflix, granted unlimited behind-the-scenes access for the past three years, has struggled. In the latest series of Drive to Survive, producers conjure the faintly ludicrous scene of the Finn sitting stark naked alongside his agent, Ville Ahtiainen, in a sauna as they gaze out at a sub-arctic lake.
“My gut feeling is that things will end up going well,” he declares, ahead of a championship that Hamilton wraps up with three races to spare.
The delusion that Bottas offers any sustained threat over 23 races is spent. Instead, the best hope of an attack on Hamilton’s supremacy lies in the bulked-up shape of Max Verstappen. It is not simply that the young Dutchman has been working with his personal trainer, Bradley Scanes, to transform his wiry physique, but that he finally has a car capable of propelling him to greater glories. It is a traditional refrain during F1’s winter breaks, this notion that Red Bull, the champions from 2010 to 2013, are narrowing the gap to the team that usurped them, but impressions from testing in Bahrain suggest it might finally be true. Across three days in the desert this month, Verstappen set the fastest time, while Mercedes completed the fewest laps of anybody.
A false alarm? Possibly. But so confident are Honda’s noises about the engine they have produced, and so high is Verstappen’s confidence after a year when he managed two wins and 10 podiums against an all-conquering Mercedes, that a passing of the flame looks nigh. Even James Vowles, Mercedes’ strategy director, acknowledged: “Red Bull are ahead on performance. They are the class act.”
Couple this early edge with the prospect of Verstappen being pushed to the extremes
of his talent by experienced team-mate Sergio Perez, and a title duel with Hamilton has never looked likelier.
Unlike Bottas, he is not in the least intimidated by the champion’s aura. There has been a frenzied debate in F1 as to what he could do to Hamilton if dealt the same technological hand. Christian Horner, his team principal at Red Bull, has stirred the pot, arguing in 2019 that he would back Verstappen in a straight fight every time. He is aware that he possesses in the 23-year-old a rough-hewn but priceless jewel.
Verstappen was so precocious in karting that he beat his father, a veteran of 106 grands prix, on an F1 simulator when he was five. He adapted so seamlessly to the track that in 2016, he became his sport’s youngest race winner, aged 18 years and 228 days, profiting from Hamilton and Rosberg’s Spanish skirmish. Only the deficiencies of his car have prevented him from converting that breakthrough into a first title tilt. Granted, he has had wrinkles in his own driving to iron out, not least after throwing away a pole position in Monaco by binning his Red Bull into the barriers. But who else, when confronted with Mercedes’ huge in-built advantage last year, could still have won the second race at Silverstone by over 11 seconds?
Verstappen’s fearlessness knows no bounds. Often, he is a compelling throwback to the old school, once shoving Esteban Ocon in the chest to protest about the Frenchman’s manoeuvre. Without wishing to condone physical altercations, there is much to be said for the rawness of his passion. Forget Bottas’s on-message bromides, what F1 cries out for is Verstappen’s readiness for ruffling feathers. He has the most inviting target this year in Hamilton, who sets out in search of an eighth championship to surpass Michael Schumacher.
It would be more refreshing for F1 all round if, in a surprise to match that of Rosberg’s 2016 triumph, Verstappen prevails. For after four years of Bottas’s blank compliance, the sport desperately needs the strife and the shock factor to return.