The champions Verstappen faces comparison with on his quest for F1 greatness

Very little fazes Max Verstappen. As Formula 1’s current dominator, and now a triple title winner, he’s wise to rivals’ attacking moves and the media’s probing work. Indeed, he’s instantly dismissive of comparisons with other world champions – publicly at least.

Repeatedly on the weekend he sealed his most recent triumph, in Qatar, he insisted “I find it very hard to compare world champions”. But that’s consistent
with his messages every time the subject has been broached
on his waltz to the 2023 crown. 

He’s sensible to avoid the PR pitfalls of winding up fans with long memories. Plus in maintaining modesty here Verstappen avoids handing a competitive edge to his rivals, in that they might use his desire to replicate an older hero to try and
knock him off course.

Historical comparisons are to a driver an example of losing focus – risking the ‘next race up’ mentality so required to win championships. But, for us mere mortals, who doesn’t love
a good debate on a driver’s place in the overall F1 legend?
It’s a topic horribly polarised on social media, where even posing such a question is often taken as an implicit threat where, of course, none exists.

Here then, is the perfect arena to compare and contrast
Verstappen with his fellow three-time (and more) F1 champions.

A one-team champion?

Juan Manuel Fangio’s famous 1950s run took in titles with four teams – Alfa Romeo, Mercedes, Ferrari and Maserati. A master of manoeuvring himself into the best cars – his reputation as a gentleman on the track and the best racer of the world championship’s first decade eased his path between seats.

Photo by: Red Bull Racing

Verstappen hasn't needed to move teams to rack up titles as Fangio before him did, having done all his winning with Red Bull

So far, Verstappen hasn’t needed to force a move to another team – not since his father, Jos, and manager Raymond Vermeulen made it clear he was ready for that famously record-setting F1 promotion at 17 and Red Bull had the means to accommodate him in F1 immediately with Toro Rosso when Mercedes, his other suitor, did not. Then, Daniil Kvyat’s savage ousting brought Verstappen to Red Bull’s senior team in 2016 – so young he could still do much learning plus the odd, impressive, bits of winning – at a crack operation.

Verstappen has a contract with his current squad until 2028 ends. With few changes to F1’s technical rules in prospect until the 2026 campaign, there’s every chance that long-term deal could include a run of five straight titles.

Jack Brabham never got beyond three titles in 1959, 1960 and 1966 – his first two for Cooper and the last for his own eponymous squad. In 2022, Verstappen launched his Verstappen.com Racing Esports venture, which includes the Team Redline organisation he has long raced for online.
He recently expressed his ambition to one day “have a way of sim racers [from his Esports team] making it into a real car”. Given the staggering sums required to buy an F1 team these days, though, it’s unlikely Verstappen would look to follow Brabham down the team ownership route.

Another point of alignment between Verstappen and Sir Jack – and a clear line of difference between Brabham and, say, Jackie Stewart and Niki Lauda, is that Brabham wasn’t afraid to push the limits of racing wheel-to-wheel

More pointedly, in this case, we might assess the characters of these two men to find a more tangible similarity. Brabham was a man of few words and what he did say made his meaning crystal clear. Verstappen, as his father Jos says, “tells [it] straightforward how things are”.

He simply has no time for poorly conceived or phrased questions and isn’t afraid of letting a journalist know as much – he outright points out his chagrin. That isn’t to say Verstappen doesn’t play certain media games – the mere mention of Lewis Hamilton’s name risks a line of questioning being shut down, especially away from televised interviews.

Risk, reward and etiquette

Another point of alignment between Verstappen and Sir Jack – and a clear line of difference between Brabham and, say, Jackie Stewart and Niki Lauda, is that Brabham wasn’t afraid to push the limits of racing wheel-to-wheel. Famous instances of him deliberately dipping wheels off-track to spray stones in the
face of those chasing him highlight what a different era he raced in, compared with Verstappen and the current pack.
But also that he would entertain a style of aggressiveness Stewart and Lauda would not.

Verstappen’s early years in F1 prompted the FIA to change the racing rules to stamp out late direction changes in braking zones. The ‘Verstappen rule’ arose in 2016 but, while F1’s focus on it has faded and, indeed, the rules of engagement have been updated since (teams are sent ‘Driving Standards Guidelines’ each year), his uncompromising style has persisted.

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Brabham could be uncompromising in his approach to racing, while he and Verstappen were also nonsense characters out of the car

Stewart in particular will be remembered, indeed lauded, as one of F1’s great safety campaigners – even though in his racing days it attracted criticism. Lauda was famous for refusing to consider taking even a single percentage point risk more than a situation merited. Verstappen isn’t a leading figure in the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association (George Russell is the only currently active racing member of its leadership) and showed in 2021 he was clearly prepared to risk contact to gain any edge in the bitter title battle that season.

The penultimate mere triple champion shares much with Verstappen. Not only did Nelson Piquet win all his titles on days other than Sundays (Fangio and Brabham also clinched championships on Saturdays), his daughter Kelly is Verstappen’s partner.

Piquet was a polarising figure when actively racing and his reputation has taken even more of a battering in recent years after he used racist and homophobic language in reference to Hamilton. In some ways this was keeping up a tradition, since during his active years he was unafraid to offer spiteful commentary about his rivals’ personal lives.

Verstappen has made awful remarks too – specifically his use of “retard” and “mongol” to describe Lance Stroll in practice for the 2020 Portuguese GP. But of course, drivers of much older eras didn’t have their every adrenaline-surge-prompted word played out to a global audience. Whatever offensive terms they might have given vent to at the time were lost in the wind rather than being inked into any assessment of their legacies.

Right place, right time

Of all the multi-champions in this list, Piquet’s racing record
is the one that stands as an outlier. He reached a rare level
of title success, with 23 wins along with way, but never shook the reputation of being a driver in the right place and the
right time, who maximised what he had with Brabham and Williams, but never forced more.

Alain Prost, of course, did. The Frenchman’s achievements across his four titles took in facets Verstappen hasn’t covered (yet) but others have, such as winning for different teams – in this case, McLaren and Williams. His ‘Professor’ reputation was staked on winning at the slowest speed, least risk possible – something he shared with Stewart and Lauda.

PLUS: The gizmo-laden Williams F1 car that allowed Prost to retire on top

Verstappen’s insistence to make a late third stop in the Austrian GP, very much not at Red Bull’s behest, shows he’s willing to take unnecessary risks even for the comparatively paltry prize of a fastest-lap bonus point.

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Prost often took a risk-averse approach to his racing, and sought to win at the slowest possible speed

The early F1 career of Prost’s great rival, Ayrton Senna, actually somewhat mirrors Verstappen’s own. During his days at Lotus after scoring impressive rookie-season podiums with Toleman, Senna was able to snare a couple of famous wins a season (Verstappen did likewise with his record of two a year, minimum, between 2017 and 2020). Then, when catapulted into title contention with McLaren in 1988, Senna’s victory statistics exploded – much as Verstappen’s did when Red Bull finally made it back to challenging for championships in 2021.

In Prost and Senna, plus the remaining multi-champions we’re still to cover, Verstappen shares in sitting near the top of the F1 win total pile. They are fifth and sixth, while Max’s 53 puts him equal third  with Vettel. Only Schumacher and Hamilton have more. To be ahead of such legends is something Verstappen “doesn’t look at”, says his father, even if Max “knows about it… I don’t think it matters too much to him”.

“But, for me,” adds Verstappen senior, “it’s something
very special to see.”

Living on the edge 

Having been Benetton team-mates in 1994, Jos and Michael Schumacher struck up a friendship that would go on to involve their families sharing holiday trips. Jos reckons, with his son having the chance to put down a run as dominant now as his friend did 20 years ago, that the pair have “very close” abilities to hyper-focus on all the smaller elements that help steer a championship campaign. 

Both Verstappen and Schumacher attack corner entries ferociously fast and then just live with the inevitable rear-end movement that comes as the apex approaches

Famed F1 designer Adrian Newey says that, much like Schumacher, Verstappen can “drive the car almost sub-consciously and that then leaves him with plenty of processing power to think about what the car is doing”.

Like Senna, Verstappen shares with Schumacher a reputation for aggressive driving which often crosses the line of what is (or should be) acceptable. But the inescapable conclusion from such a comparison is Verstappen’s transgressions don’t come anywhere near Schumacher’s in terms of severity.

PLUS: How F1's Verstappen era compares to Schumacher's early 2000s dominance

But a much more important similarity between Verstappen and Schumacher concerns their driving styles. Both attack corner entries ferociously fast and then just live with the inevitable rear-end movement that comes as the apex approaches. A succession of Verstappen’s Red Bull team-mates have been unable to match him here – particularly when it comes to making this effective in low- and medium-speed turns. A rapid car rotation strength on corner entry for one particular driver isn’t actually all that new for Red Bull, as Sebastian Vettel famously made an art of doing this in the 2010-2011 blown-diffuser days.

Photo by: Erik Junius

Verstappen's aggressive driving was seen in battle with Leclerc in Las Vegas, but has arguably never reached Schumacher's level

For both Verstappen and Schumacher, having done so much of a corner already even before fully getting to it via sharp car rotation, steering lock can be released earlier. In Verstappen’s case, this significantly contributes to his mastery of the Pirelli tyres. Until relatively recently, this was an overlooked part of his game – even though he shares with Hamilton a brilliant ability to ‘manage’ modern F1 tyres.

Where Verstappen and Schumacher differ in driving style is that Verstappen’s is smoother overall, which again aids his tyre preservation needs. But it actually harms him on street circuits, where harder steering inputs are rewarded. Even though he’s taken five victories on such territory so far, Verstappen even professes to “personally [not] really enjoy street circuits”, which makes it one of the standout weak points in what
is still an overwhelmingly brilliant racing package.

He’s not Red Bull’s only dominant multi-champion –
Vettel got there first a decade earlier. The pair, who are Formula 1’s youngest-ever champion (Vettel) and race driver (Verstappen) have accrued 39 and 53 wins for the energy drinks giant. The rest of Vettel’s 53 total stems from his unsuccessful move away to Ferrari.

Vettel was famously “very methodical and organised in the way he went about his racing”, says Red Bull’s only team boss, Christian Horner. Vettel would pore over every single detail he could consume – even visiting the Pirelli factory early in its stint as F1’s sole tyre supplier to better understand the rubber. When asked if Verstappen would do the same, Horner will only say he’s “the most straightforward driver that I’ve ever had”.

Vettel also racked up 57 poles in his F1 career, with Verstappen currently sitting on 32. This is a slightly unfair comparison right now for Verstappen as Red Bull’s first attempts at ground-effect cars in the RB18 and RB19 are deliberately engineered to be kind on their tyres in race stints, so suffer with comparatively poor qualifying warm-up on rubber that is hard to get working perfectly anyway. But nevertheless, it is Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc who is considered the fastest one-lap specialist of the current crop.

Looking out for Lewis

Hamilton tops the list of most F1 poles with 104 but, like Verstappen, qualifying speed isn’t the most significant part of his armoury. For so long, a lack of mistakes once he’d escaped a run of making them early in his career (Verstappen’s early 2018 errors and un-acknowledged reaction to them are pertinent here) characterised Hamilton’s run to topping F1’s title charts with Schumacher. Plus leading the way in wins overall on 103.

Indeed, Hamilton’s clean-racing reputation only got called into question when Verstappen forced him to give as good as he was getting wheel-to-wheel in 2021. But what sets the pair apart most is Hamilton’s willingness to embrace his F1 fame and leadership. While Verstappen will speak up on topics that irk him, Hamilton routinely fronts up to F1’s many contradictory issues and acts as a natural ambassador away from the paddock – from talk shows to fashion and music.

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Verstappen has disrupted Hamilton's period of dominance, but the Briton remains the statistical benchmark

Hamilton isn’t done with F1 yet but is closer to the end of his career than the start as he chases the eighth title taken away from him in the Abu Dhabi officiating saga. Verstappen appears to still be approaching his ‘peak’, with Hamilton respectively going the other way – judging by his poor errors in recent years on the opening laps at Spa 2022 and Qatar 2023.

So, might Verstappen one day match Hamilton and Schumacher on seven titles or even score more? Jos knows there’s one important element – evident in the success of all these champions to different degrees – that cannot be overlooked.

“You need the equipment to do it. If he has that, he will do it. But [if not], then not. It’s very simple.”

The elite club - since 1950

Photo by: Sutton Images

Piquet clinched the third of his world championships in 1987 for Williams

 

Could Verstappen become the GOAT?

 

It might not be his outright stated quest but, given he’s only 26 and already a triple world champion, Max Verstappen has time on his side to match F1’s current title and victory statistics record holders: Lewis Hamilton and Michael Schumacher. That would go some way to settling the always subjective Greatest of All Time (GOAT) debate.

 

His path to F1 greatness started as a precocious, driven 17-year-old with “a curiosity to push everything around him on the car, on the people working for him, and then the driving skills”. Those are the words of his first race engineer at Toro Rosso, Xevi Pujolar, now Alfa Romeo’s chief trackside engineer, who saw this “from day one, from the first test”.

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

Can Verstappen keep up his remarkable success and become F1's statistical all-time great?