Why Verstappen's new Red Bull deal was critical to Honda's F1 future

The 2021 driver-market silly season became a whole lot less exciting over the winter as Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc pledged themselves to Red Bull and Ferrari on long deals that will take them well into the new decade.

Apart from the timing of the announcements - Leclerc's just as most people were sitting down with a calculator to figure out how long to blast the Christmas turkey, Verstappen's just as they were figuring out how to shed the excess poundage from all that feasting - it was the duration of those contracts that intrigued.

As a driver, unless your dad owns the team, you'll feel your manager has earned their percentage if they can draw up a deal for one or two years plus options for more. Short contracts militate against drivers slipping into cruise-and-collect mode, especially if their team-mate is beatable.

So for both Leclerc and Verstappen to get three-year extensions to their existing deals, taking them to the end of 2024 and 2023 respectively, demonstrates their perceived value to their teams.

Verstappen's renewal was the most interesting play.

Red Bull has had to work hard to keep hold of him in the face of raids by Mercedes and Ferrari (in the hybrid era, why would a talent of his magnitude go anywhere else?). His previous three-year deal, due to end after this season, was concluded in a rush in 2017 when Mercedes went shopping for a potential alternative to Valtteri Bottas.

At that point Max was labouring with a marginally uncompetitive car, Red Bull having failed to adapt to the new rules quickly enough, and raging against repeated engine failures. Helmut Marko and Christian Horner really had to make it worth his while to stay on.

Rumours began to circulate in the middle of last year that Mercedes was on the hunt again, before deciding to lease Esteban Ocon to Renault and to commit to Bottas.

Now, one has to treat such talk with due scepticism, because much of it emits from the Dutch media, who have a vested interest in keeping Max in the headlines: a great many orangemen have joined the F1 press corps on the back of his fame. If he coughs, they report it; and if he doesn't, they assume he might have asphyxiated - or worse - and report that.

So are we to read the timing and duration of this announcement as a large-print "hands off" notice, and a pre-emptive damping-down of contractual talk at what could be a critical juncture in the team's history? To an extent, yes.

But, equally, Max is a hyper-competitive soul.

Yes, he's said he couldn't partner Leclerc at Ferrari because "two number ones doesn't work". He also infuriated the Scuderia by accusing it of cheating, so perhaps that door is now closed against him.

But, equally, he's shown willing to take Lewis Hamilton on in equal machinery at Mercedes.

That won't happen now - Lewis will surely have hung up his boots by 2024 - so Max must have decided, or at least been convinced, that Red Bull-Honda is a competitive proposition.

Certainly there was another slow start under tweaked regulations last year, and the engine took three performance steps before the package looked like a frontrunning proposition, but Red Bull had debugged the car's sensitive aero by mid-season. And while the headline results appear to be merely on par with the hybrid Renault years, in terms of laptime the Honda package is now closer to Mercedes and Ferrari.

Honda, too, has talked of Max as being the next Senna. It wants - needs - a marketable superstar to justify the cost of extending its own programme beyond the end of 2021. But will we see Max demonstrating an NSX while wearing a pair of tasselled loafers and a comfy sweater? Ah, perhaps not...