The steps Verstappen and Red Bull took to expose Ferrari's 2022 failings

In parc ferme in Suzuka, where, after a rain-disrupted, chaotic race, the thick fog of points confusion gradually lifted to reveal that Max Verstappen had sealed the drivers’ title, the Red Bull driver was collared by former champion Jenson Button and asked how his second championship compared with his first. Verstappen’s response was unequivocal.

“The second is even more beautiful,” he smiled. “Just [because of] the season we’ve had, with the wins, the great races, the teamwork, the 1-2s…”

He could have gone on. With one race in the campaign still to come, Verstappen has scored a record 14 wins, brushing aside the single-season total of 13 posted by Michael Schumacher in 2004 and Sebastian Vettel in 2013. He’s racked up the biggest points haul for a single campaign in history – 429 – and outscored his only real non-Red Bull rival Charles Leclerc by a whopping 139 points.

The raw statistics of Verstappen’s second world title paint a picture of an unstoppable juggernaut on a scorched-earth march to glory. The question, however, is whether this is the result of the irresistible force generated by the 25-year old, or a function of other factors – a regularly sharpened spearhead in the shape of an aggressively developed RB18 boosted by a dwindling challenge from a blunted Ferrari – playing into his gifted hands. The answer, as ever in sport, lies somewhere between the two.

Rewind to the start of the season and Red Bull entered the title fight as post-testing favourite. A low-key outing in Barcelona gave way to final-day updates in Bahrain and a burst of pace that left Verstappen almost seven tenths of a second clear of Leclerc, though he did benefit from stickier C5 tyres.

At the opening round in Bahrain, however, the positivity evaporated as fast as the fuel in Verstappen’s RB18, as a vapour lock forced him to retire after 54 laps. Verstappen bounced back with a convincing win in Jeddah but when he stopped on track in Melbourne after 38 laps owing to an unrelated fuel issue, alarm bells began to sound.

Verstappen retired from two of the opening three races of the season to give Leclerc an early edge in the championship fight

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

“This is not what you need when you want to fight for the championship,” he lamented afterwards. “The gap is already pretty big – at this stage we need 45 races!”

Verstappen’s verdict, flippantly made, wasn’t without substance. Although 19 races remained, Verstappen left Melbourne 46 points adrift of Leclerc. Only once in the era of 25 points for a win had a similar deficit been overturned – when Sebastian Vettel came back from being 44 points behind Fernando Alonso in 2012.

Weight for it

The RB18’s early mechanical woes weren’t the only concern, however. His races might have ended in technical issues but Verstappen’s headline-grabbing exits served to mask limitations elsewhere, particularly with regard to the weight of the RB18 and its effect on his ability to extract the maximum from it.

“We started the year with a very fat car, it was a bit overweight,” Verstappen said later in the season, at Monza. “It was in the wrong place in the car as well as overweight, so that’s why it was just understeering a lot more and prone to front locking.”

"The moment where I thought, ‘Now we’re going to win it’ was after Paul Ricard, where the lead increased by quite a bit" Max Verstappen

“A bit overweight” was an understatement. While most of the grid had failed to get close to the minimum weight of 798kg, the RB18 was one of the grid’s lardiest machines, as much as 10kg over the limit. The bulk was reckoned to cost as much as 0.3s in lap time.

Reducing weight became a key concern and chief contributor to Verstappen’s title charge. The first signs of development came at round four in Imola where a number of lighter components were introduced along with revisions to the floor. For the first time Red Bull was able to switch on the RB18’s tyres better than Ferrari and, more importantly, suffered less wear both in the first sprint race of the season and in the main event.

Verstappen took his first pole of the season, won the sprint and the race, while Ferrari and Leclerc, losing ground to the swifter Red Bulls on fading rubber, gambled by switching to soft tyres. Chasing to reel in Verstappen and second-placed Sergio Perez, Leclerc spun and finished sixth. While Leclerc’s error was an immediate blow, team boss Mattia Binotto admitted that in light of Red Bull’s development capacity, the races to come might result in more debilitating injury.

“We know that developing will be a key element of the season,” he said. “We know that Red Bull will be very strong, they are coming back.”

Passing Leclerc en-route to victory in the Imola sprint would prove the start of the turning tide

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

He wasn’t wrong. Over the following races constant refinement brought the RB18 towards Verstappen, allowing him to fully exploit a suite of improvements, from an obvious increase in speed through the weight reduction, to the ability to move ballast around in pursuit of better balance and to help dial out an initially weak front end. Add in reduced tyre wear as the weight came off (5kg by the Canadian GP according to Helmut Marko) and Verstappen – known to favour a sharp front end that provides confidence on turn-in, leaving his supreme car control to sort out any rear-end laziness – went from fighting a rearguard action on several fronts to leading overwhelming assaults.

“At the beginning of the season, we didn’t have the possibility to move the weight, and it was part of the setup,” confirms Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache. “But it’s everything together and after you find your performance somewhere, and it’s a little bit more tricky to set up the car, then it went in favour of Max.”

 Swing when you’re winning

The swing towards Verstappen gave him all the tools he needed to unleash a relentless charge. From being 46 points adrift of Leclerc after the race in Melbourne, Verstappen battered his way to a 46-point advantage after the Canadian Grand Prix, collecting 150 points in six races compared with Leclerc’s 99. And though Ferrari staged a mini-revival with Sainz winning at Silverstone and Leclerc supreme in Austria, Verstappen delivered a hammer blow in France with a dominant win as Leclerc spun off. The gap to Leclerc expanded to 63 points and Verstappen began to believe the title was his.

“There were a few moments where I thought, ‘We have a good chance of winning it,’” he says. “But I think the moment where I thought, ‘Now we’re going to win it’ was after Paul Ricard, where the lead increased by quite a bit. We had a quite competitive car, I knew it was going to be quite close, but I was like, ‘This is a gap we cannot give away anymore.’”

He was as good as his word. On the run to taking an unassailable lead in Japan Verstappen failed to win just once, in Singapore, where the laurels were picked up by his team-mate. Red Bull’s ability to successfully put the RB18 on an extreme diet undoubtedly aided Verstappen’s charge but was development the whole story? Team-mate Perez, the only other driver with first-hand knowledge of the merits of the RB18, is the first to disagree.

 “I’ve said it before: I don’t feel like Red Bull have had a dominant car, so to have won the championship the way Max won it, I think he definitely found a gear or two more compared with anyone else,” he says. “I think in the beginning I was a lot closer to him but once he got comfortable with the car and I was more uncomfortable with it, he was driving at another level compared with everyone else. The races he did were sometimes incredible to watch.

“He clearly has stepped up. He really delivers from FP1 all the way to the last lap of Sunday, at a very high level. He hardly makes mistakes. And I think it’s something that is very hard to get and to be able to drive at your 100% without making mistakes is the thing that makes him so special at the moment.” 

Perez believes Verstappen has stepped up a gear in his driving in 2022

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

A tempered temperament

For Helmut Marko, Verstappen’s 2022 improvements have chiefly come in two areas – temperament, and even greater pace.

“He’s far more relaxed. He’s a much more mature driver,” Marko says. “Max now drives faster with less risk and also with less wear to the equipment. In the past, if something didn’t work out on Friday, he was close to freaking out. He sees it very differently now.

“We would be working hard for the race, which bothered Max a lot a year or two ago. He just always wanted to be P1. But what is most important, of course, is victory. Now, if you know it’s possible, you can live with second or third on the grid.”

"This year, even in adversity, he’s demonstrated unbelievable levels of skill and confidence. So I’ve seen a more mature Max, driving better than I’ve ever seen him drive" Paul Monaghan

The Red Bull motorsport advisor also picks out two moments from the season to illustrate his point, the first coming in Suzuka: “The way he has reeled off his races this year was really impressive and the way he overtook Leclerc on the outside after the start in Suzuka was out of this world.”

The second was Verstappen’s reaction to the slow pitstop during the US Grand Prix which dropped him out of the lead.

“He’s so special,” says Marko. “After this pitstop, going so on the limit, but not ruining his tyres, that shows how much more mature he is between this year and last year. That is why we believe it’s not the end of what we’ve seen from Max. There is still something to come.”

Verstappen’s initial reaction to the 11.3s stop in Austin was to spit a furious “beautiful, fucking beautiful” over the radio to his pitwall but, after recovering to win, his post-race contrition was clear.

“Of course we had that stop. I was a bit upset but I just kept pushing,” he told his team.

Verstappen shrugged off a slow pitstop at Austin to win, impressing Marko with his temperament

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

The ability to dismiss setbacks and quickly move on is a marked change from the Verstappen of even a year ago, as Red Bull chief engineer Paul Monaghan attests.

“I’ve seen a more assured Max,” he says. “You know, disappointments like Bahrain and Australia didn’t derail him. He’d come to you and you’d say, ‘well, this has happened or that happened and we’ll sort it out,’ and you’d see a calmness in him that wasn’t always there in the past.

“This year, even in adversity, he’s demonstrated unbelievable levels of skill and confidence. So I’ve seen a more mature Max, driving better than I’ve ever seen him drive.”

For Verstappen, the shift is purely down to time and experience.

“You know you can’t change [setbacks] anyway, so you have to try and find a solution to try and get ahead or to try and improve the situation,” he says. “I think it’s something you only learn over time, and with experience as well.”

Always dismissive of sudden, superhuman leaps in capability, Verstappen doesn’t believe his driving has taken a significant step forward.

“I find that difficult,” he says. “I think you always look back at a year [and ask], ‘What can I do better?’ You always try to be a more complete driver. But you’re not a robot, you make mistakes, everyone makes mistakes. It’s all about trying to minimise that and just minimise risk.

“I don’t necessarily think I became a faster driver, because I don’t think at this stage of your career you suddenly find a tenth or two-tenths in your driving. It’s all about learning from previous seasons and just trying to apply that. And sometimes, in some situations that can make you a little bit faster because you know a little bit better what to do. Can be the car, can be the tyres, just track experience.” 

Verstappen himself does not believe that he is a faster driver than before

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

The Maranello horror show

A more assured, confident and pacier Verstappen at the wheel of a vastly improved car resulted in episodes of jaw-dropping dominance. Perez points to his team-mate being “on another planet” and “untouchable” during a stunning weekend in Belgium, while Leclerc called the Dutchman’s Zandvoort qualifying pace “scary”.

But where there is dominance there is also submission and, after setting the early pace with the F1-75, Ferrari’s title challenge suffered death, if not by a thousand cuts, then certainly by a trio of debilitating lacerations, as reliability woes, operational calamities and driver error robbed the team of major points-scoring opportunities.

In Spain and Azerbaijan Leclerc’s engine failed while he was leading and he was forced to take a grid penalty in Canada that further hampered his progress. Carlos Sainz, too, suffered a spectacular PU failure in Austria. Strategic blunders in Monaco (a botched stacked stop for intractable hard tyres), Britain (leaving Leclerc a sitting duck on hard tyres for a safety car restart) and in Hungary (again inexplicably opting for unworkable hard tyres as Verstappen bore down on the lead from 10th on the grid) severely compromised Leclerc’s title chances. He too contributed with the spin in Imola and through crashing out of the lead in France.

The theme of Verstappen's second victory march was as much about the harmonious convergence of competitive clean-sheet design, relentless and spectacularly effective development and trackside superiority as it was about the bravura solo of his driving

However, for Ferrari’s racing director Laurent Mekies, the team’s dwindling challenge was a function of simply not being quick enough on Sundays against an ever-improving Red Bull.

“It’s no secret that on race pace, we’re not as good as in quali,” he says. “Sometimes it’s down to higher tyre degradation compared with our competitors but sometimes it is simply pace. And I think of the example of Austin, [where] Charles pushed hard to stay with the quicker cars, to pass Checo, to fight with Max. And it had a price, because the truth is we were simply not as fast as them, again. So for us, it’s about trying to work on all the small details to gain some race pace. But it’s not something you improve in one day.”

It’s clear, then, that while Verstappen’s record-breaking title win would undoubtedly have foundered without the pitch-perfect performances of races such as Imola or Spa, the theme of his second victory march was as much about the harmonious convergence of competitive clean-sheet design, relentless and spectacularly effective development and trackside superiority as it was about the bravura solo of Verstappen’s driving. And after such a complete campaign there’s no reason to doubt the song will remain the same in the coming years.

“I still have a few more years in F1,” Verstappen says. “I want to win more races. I want to try and win more titles. With everyone within the team, everyone who is involved with us, they deserve even more than what we are showing at the moment. As long as we can keep them all together I think we’re capable of even more great seasons.”

Verstappen believes he has many more years at the top to come

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images