Max Verstappen: One of the greatest of all times

How does he drive that turd to a pole?!?

 

Ultra consistent, superbly adaptive. I agree, he is very aggressive but also uses the way the rules are written to his advantage, not his fault the rules are written poorly lol.

He is on a different planet.

I bet you Mclaren is starting to regret extending Norris as early as they did as they would be able to offer Max a dream deal for next year: Great chassis with fantastic people working on it and combine that with what is likely going to be the best engine again.

Just like Ferrari will be spitting through every little detail of their Lewis contract right now, too.

 

No argument or debate from the OP from me.

And he's doing it in the 3rd or possibly 4th fastest car.

M4X exerts the maximum out of whatever car he's driving and makes EVERYONE else on the grid look mediocre.....in the dry and in the wet.

 

I feel lucky to see him race in his prime! I never saw Fangio or Clark. I did get to watch Schumacher- this feels similar.

 

I find it difficult to fault anything said in the original post. While I do not like Max he is an exceptional driver and the kind that comes along every generation or so.

 

And he dresses better which suits the fashionistas here...

 

To some extent, it's not the car AND IF (big if) Max wins the 2025 WDC title, it wasn't because Max had the fastest car.

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I hope Max can stay ahead of Piastri as far as tire deg.

 

Apparently they overfueled the car as well by 6-7kg because he had no time to box and fuel, and had traffic on final lap 2x.

 

He has a great car this weekend. Same as Japan.

 

It's not the fastest.....at both venues.

 

9 tenths clear of his teammate yet again.

I appreciate that Yuki is not the best teammate of all time; but 9 tenths is ASTRONOMICAL.

Max is performing at this insane level time and time again. It's not a fluke.

 

Hunt described it as "balls".

 

"Big balls"

 

Aw, geeeeze…….

 

Yes Max is great. He's had some great performances recently, as with all greats past drivers. Thats what great drivers do. They have have some great performances. But the RB is still a top car. The RB is designed around Max. Therefore the 2nd drivers results are not a great indication. This is how RB operates. Tire deg has been on par recently , good top speed. All these things are the result of clever engineering. The car is still 2nd along with Merc behind Mclaren IMO. I can't put Max near the top of my list as of now. But at least he's on the list.

 

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Yes, there are more races per year under the Max era. Nonetheless, here's a comparison of how long it took some great F1 drivers to reach 106 podiums.

Prost: 38 years, 8 months, 14 days, 199 races
Alonso: 42 years, 3 months, 12 days, 376 races
Verstappen: 26 years, 8 months, 30 days, 195 races

Hamilton: at 32y, 3m, 3d, during his 190th race, took his 106th podium at the ChineseGP 2017.
Schumacher: 35y/5m/21d, 170th race. Europe 2002.
Vettel: 31y/27d, 210th race, Hungary 2018.

 

BEAST mode

- Verstappen is 9 years active in F1 with 54 grand prix victories.
- Hamilton after 9 years active in F1 only had 43 wins.
- Vettel after 9 years had 42 wins
- Senna after 9 years had 36 wins
- Schumacher after 9 years had 36 wins along with Prost as well with 36 wins after 9 years in F1.



Max's 3 year average, from 2021 thru 2023, win percentage is 66.6% which surpasses Hamilton's HIGHEST single year win percentage of 64.7% in 2020.

Max's 2 year average, from 2022 thru 2023, win percentage is 77.3% surpassing Ascari's F1 highest single season win percentage record of 75% in 1952.

The current record set by Max for a single season win percentage in 2023 is 86.4%.....this highest currently in F1 history.

 

I don't think that's it. Plenty of drivers in f1 that are willing to crash to go faster (Stroll does it all the time), Max can just somehow extract more out of it before getting out of control. He doesn't have very many big moments on his own like a Gilles, where you can say that guy just had huge stones. He's just more talented. And in anything, he's also super fast in sim racing in everything, setting world record laps against people that do sim racing all day every day only.

I'm also not a big fan but he's almost inarguably better than anyone else in f1. If only he didn't drive like a complete prick in wheel 2 wheel stuff and he'd be a lot more likable....

 

Max adapts himself to the way the car needs to be driven quickly, which is why he's quick in everything. He hated last year's car and this year, he complains a lot about it and you can see he's not comfortable driving it, but he is still quick with it. Aside from Michael and Alonso I've never seen anything like it in my time viewing F1, and I think Max drives bad cars better than Michael and Alonso did.

You're right, it's not big balls, it's an incredible feel for the car. He doesn't brake particularly late, and he doesn't even use the full entirety of the track most of the time; being earlier on the brakes gives him that little bit of extra time to know what the car is doing and compensates for that. When his teammates want to get closer to the time Max is doing they do it by braking later, using all and more of the track...and this leads to them making more mistakes.

These heavy and long post 2014 cars aren't even that advantageous to him. The V8 and V10 cars would be much more on the nose and quicker to react to his inputs.

I really hope we'll see him do Daytona 24 and Le Mans etc before long; and whatever else he fancies when he stops F1 altogether.

 

Another thing about Max is he seems to be able to drive any car extremely fast almost immediately.

He did a test with the Ferrari GT3 car and was incredibly fast. He did hopped in the Acura prototype car and was quick right away.

We can talk about his speed all day, but his consistency might be more impressive. He may find a 1 to 2 tenths that nearly every other driver can't give you, but he'll do it for 50 laps and next thing you know he's 5-10 seconds ahead. Truth is, he's often 4 tenths or more faster than this teammates, and being 30-60 seconds up to road isn't uncommon.

 

There’s already a Verstappen thread that’s more than 10 years old with more than half a million views. How many do we need?