Jon Noble: Why Verstappen is both right and wrong in his bold McLaren and Ferrari claim

Max Verstappen left everyone in no doubt about the perception he has of his own performance level this year after wrapping up his fourth world title in Las Vegas. Amid a campaign where he has battled against not having the fastest car for much of the time, the Dutchman made the suggestion that the championship outcome would have been the same if he had been driving for either of his closest competitors.

Asked by media if he felt he would have come out on top if he had been racing for McLaren, Verstappen said: “Yes, even earlier, so [I would have been] further ahead. [With the Ferrari], pretty much the same, I think. The Mercedes, no. I think that would have been trickier.”

It is a scenario that has inevitably triggered much debate among fans, because it cuts to the core about which of the top stars has the outright speed, racing nuance and consistency to have made a bigger impact on a team than the current incumbents.

Verstappen’s claim is clear that he feels he would have done a better job than both Lando Norris and Charles Leclerc, and helped enable their respective teams overhaul whoever was in a Red Bull.

OPINION: Why Verstappen's 2024 title is his greatest success yet

And it is very easy to pick out individual moments throughout the 2024 campaign where it can be suggested that Verstappen would not have let points slip through his grasp like his rivals did.

From Norris’s perspective you can argue over the 14 points from Imola and Spain (seven points swing for both drivers if they changed positions), the lost haul from Austria, plus the missed opportunities of Hungary, Monza and Baku. And would Brazil have had the same outcome if their positions were switched?

Leclerc had a weekend to forget in Canada that cost him points

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Then from Leclerc’s viewpoint, there is the disaster of Canada (which did not look great before the retirement), the lacklustre pace in Austria and Britain, and then perhaps the better job that should have been done in Singapore, Mexico and Vegas.

But the danger of automatically awarding all these lost points to Verstappen in the scenario that he was racing the McLaren and Ferrari instead is that you are trying to ram a perfect square peg into an imperfect round hole.

After all, this has been a season where the ultimate truth is that if you ran the same races again, you would get different outcomes. And in full chaos theory impact, small changes of circumstance could have a dramatic effect in plotting a different path for the title fight.

Perez took zero points away from Verstappen, and his lack of form meant that neither strategies nor races had to be compromised because of a need to play things fair across both cars

You can tot up Norris’ missed points through small circumstance like the poor start in Hungary, and you can imagine how much better a position Ferrari would be in if that Spanish GP upgrade had delivered a step forward rather than the high-speed bouncing that proved so costly.

As Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur said about if there were any potential frustrations of seeing his own team’s championship challenge derailed by just a single upgrade: “This is an easy one. It's always easy at the end of the season to say without the crash in Singapore, without this or without this, we would have been champions. I think it's true for McLaren.

“They had also some issues. It's true for everybody on the grid, we are all missing opportunities. Part of our business is not only to have the best cars, but also to score the maximum of points that we can score.”

While Perez has been mired in the midfield, Verstappen was given the optimum strategy

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

There are other factors at play that perhaps also skew the view that Verstappen’s season was perfection – and that if he slotted himself in at McLaren and Ferrari it would be the same scenario there.

The first is that he had a team-mate who never properly challenged him. Perez took zero points away from Verstappen as he never finished ahead of him, and his lack of form meant that neither strategies nor races had to be compromised because of a need to play things fair across both cars.

Norris and Leclerc were in very different scenarios because they had team-mates who were much more evenly matched, did finish ahead of them at times and also triggered some stress points when it came to the problem of aligning team needs and those of each driver.

If you take the best result of the McLaren and the Ferrari from each race and hand them all to one driver, then the points situation looks very different.  At McLaren, the perfect season would have netted 402 points in the drivers’ championship up until now, which would put that driver just one point behind Verstappen.

At Ferrari, a similar one-car whitewash would have resulted in the lead car having 371 points, which would still leave it within a shout of the world championship. So there is an argument to suggest that if Norris or Leclerc had a weaker team-mate then they too could be ending the year as champion without doing anything vastly different.

Verstappen’s perfection perception is also further boosted by the fact that Red Bull is a crack squad that lets very few opportunities slip through its grasp. Beyond the brake problem that put Verstappen out in Australia, it pretty much maximised all its chances.

Verstappen's Australian retirement was a rare occasion of Red Bull not maximising results

Photo by: Mark Horsburgh / Motorsport Images

Some of that is operational brilliance and some of it is down to the rub of the green – like the slow pitstop in Austria actually opening the door to a better points gain over Norris than Verstappen would have got leading him home in a 1-2. Some stewards’ decisions also were totally out of his hands.

Then we cannot also forget that Verstappen always had the comfort blanket of the world championship lead. It meant on the days that he knew he could not win, then settling for second best would be good enough – as there was not that ever increasing intensity to find the extra hundredths of a second needed to keep closing the gap as the races ticked down.

Plus, in those moments where the championship was on the line in a direct head-to-head fight, having the advantage of being the points leader – with nothing to lose if there is a crash – means you can act in a far more aggressive way than if you are coming from behind.

The attraction of all sports is that nobody is perfect with their execution. There are days competitors get it right, and others when even the best get it wrong

Would McLaren’s second half of the season played out in a similar way – with the execution of ‘Papaya Rules’ – if it had come out of the summer break with a points advantage that it needed to protect from a fast-approaching rival?

Is it fathomable to suggest that McLaren would have let Norris and Piastri race in the way they did on the first lap at Monza if they were protecting a world championship lead?

And would Verstappen and Red Bull have had such a trouble-free and perfect run if they too were coming from behind and needed to push more to maximise gains, rather than look after what they had already got?

Verstappen's points lead has given him the freedom to take more risks

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Ultimately, there are a host of factors that you can swap around to argue that Verstappen, Norris or Leclerc could have won the title in any of the top three cars. If Perez had been Norris’s team-mate at McLaren, with the constructors’ championship not really a factor, then you can argue that could have been enough to make him champion.

And equally, if you reran this season, with Norris and McLaren knowing the opportunities that would open up after Miami with all the learnings they have made in understanding what it takes to win, you could even argue that they would not get it wrong a second time.

But the attraction of all sports is that nobody is perfect with their execution. There are days competitors get it right, and others when even the best get it wrong. Verstappen delivered all he needed for Red Bull in 2024 in an impressive campaign, and you can certainly tweak the circumstances to say he could have done the same for McLaren and Ferrari.

But would he? That is probably a step too far to be sure of.

It's far from clear if Verstappen would've also been celebrating if wearing red or orange

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool