By many statistics, Max Verstappen’s 2024 championship victory will lag behind his previous three titles. It lacks the excitement, drama and controversy of its first in 2021. It struggles to match the brutal quality of both 2022 and 2023, when it won 34 of 44 races.

Verstappen himself described his fourth title as a challenge, while Red Bull team boss Christian Horner said it was the Dutchman’s “best and most difficult championship”. It’s hard to disagree with that, and the lack of wins and pole positions since late spring confirms that.

After seven victories in the first ten rounds, Verstappen has only achieved one victory. He has often had the third or fourth fastest car, yet has risen to the challenge of a resurgent, albeit flawed, McLaren and Lando Norris.

However, when you dig a little deeper into the numbers, you gain a greater appreciation for Verstappen’s performance, and also for how unusual Formula 1 has been over the past eight months.

41 years

The last time a driver won the championship with a car that did not finish in the top two of the constructors’ standings was in 1983, when Nelson Piquet won for Brabham, who finished third in the overall standings.

Red Bull is 29 points behind Ferrari and is third. With Sergio Perez’s abysmal form, victory in the final two rounds in Qatar and Abu Dhabi seems unlikely. This would make Verstappen only the third man in F1 history to take the crown in a machine that finished third or worse, after Piquet 41 years ago and Williams’ Keke Rosberg in 1982.

This is largely because Perez has been almost useless for Red Bull, but there is little doubt that Verstappen has often had to deal with the third and occasionally fourth fastest car.

Six points per race

Verstappen has suffered a dip in results since the Miami Grand Prix in May, when McLaren’s upgrade package transformed their car into a race winner. Up to and including Miami, the number of points per round was 22.67, but has now dropped to 16.67.

Despite this, Verstappen still scored more than Norris after this point, getting the most out of his car while Norris too often did not. Despite McLaren’s rapid progress, Norris improved his points per lap after Miami by 2.23 – from 13.83 points to 16.06.

5.44 times

While Verstappen’s results declined after Miami, Perez’s decline ruined Red Bull’s hopes of a double championship. After a strong start to the season with 103 points in the first five rounds, the Mexican not only failed to finish on the podium in the next 16 events, but his highest points tally over a weekend was his eight at Zandvoort.

Verstappen’s points total from Imola to Las Vegas is 267, while Perez’s is a paltry 49. For comparison, Haas’ Nico Hülkenberg scored 29 points in the same period. In other words: Verstappen has scored 5.44 times as many points as his beleaguered teammate in that time.

Not since 1983 has a teammate of a title-winning driver finished as low as eighth at the end of the season, when Riccardo Patrese finished ninth behind championship-winning Piquet at Brabham. However, that was at a time of much higher attrition, with the Italian withdrawing from nine of the fifteen rounds that year, compared to Piquet’s four non-finishes.

3.8

After winning seven of the first ten rounds and extending his championship lead over Norris to 69 points, Verstappen has finished on average outside the podium since the Austrian Grand Prix in June. In the first 10 laps his average finishing position was 1.67 but in the next 12 that dropped to 3.8 – only slightly worse than Norris (3.36).

His total of two podium finishes in seven Grand Prix finishes between Austria and Azerbaijan is also his worst performance in a comparable period since 2017, his first full season with Red Bull.

10 in a row

In 2023, Verstappen broke the record for most consecutive Grand Prix victories with a perfect run from Miami to Monza. However, in 2024 he endured a winless run of ten Grands Prix, stretching from Austria to his brilliant win in the rain at Interlagos.

Before that, the last time he was away from the top step of the podium for so long was an 11-race run in 2020 – a year in which he won just two races.

52 points

What Verstappen needs to score in the final two rounds (two Grands Prix and one sprint race) to overhaul his 2022 championship-winning score.

That season lasted more than two laps less (22 to 24), so the difference in points per lap this year is 18.31 compared to 20.6 in 2022. The record days of 2023 when Verstappen scored 575 points (26.13 per round) and won 19 of the 22 Grand Prix are now a distant memory.

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