LUSAIL, Qatar — It seems Max Verstappen is at his best when he has a point to prove. Even for a driver who consistently operates in a league of his own, he is able to access another level of ruthless efficiency in the moments when he is truly fired up, and Sunday’s Qatar Grand Prix weekend was a prime example.
The catalyst came on Saturday evening when his first pole position in 11 grands prix was stripped away by the stewards with a dubious one-place penalty. The end result was a race win regardless of the penalty, and a win that had looked nigh-on impossible earlier in the same weekend.
“Karma is a wonderful thing,” Verstappen’s race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase said over team radio as the victorious Red Bull crossed the line. Even with the title wrapped up last weekend in Las Vegas, this victory — the 63rd of his career — still counted for a lot.
Rewind 24 hours and Verstappen had driven down the same pit straight thinking he had secured pole position – his first for a grand prix since the Austrian Grand Prix in June. It was a particularly hard-fought pole position too, beating the Mercedes of George Russell by 0.055 seconds despite struggling with the handling of his Red Bull throughout sprint qualifying and the sprint race earlier in the weekend.
“Aggressive” setup changes ahead of grand prix qualifying had helped correct the handling imbalance Verstappen had felt in the sprint sessions, and all of a sudden his Red Bull felt “connected” for the first time in a long time.
“It couldn’t have been worse [in the sprint]. So we just looked at it and, it’s not all super clear, but we’re like, ‘well, we have to go and try this [setup] direction’,” he explained. “We put it on the car and it worked. Yeah, a miracle happened!
“When you’re fighting a Haas in the sprint to fighting for the win in the main race, yeah, it’s been quite a big swing in performance!”
To then have all that hard work taken away by a stewards’ decision was hard to stomach, especially a decision that is largely unprecedented.
Drivers are regularly investigated by the stewards for driving slowly as they prepare for a qualifying lap, but mitigating circumstances such as traffic or letting a car pass means they are almost always let off. In Verstappen’s case in Qatar, he had slowed to let Fernando Alonso and Lando Norris pass when Russell, who was also on a preparation lap, filled his mirrors in the middle of Turn 12.
The stewards not only found Verstappen had fallen out of the delta time used to measure whether drivers are taking too long on a preparation lap, and therefore “driven unnecessarily slowly,” but in doing so created a dangerous situation with Russell. Hence the one-place penalty when other drivers have been let off in the past.
Unsurprisingly, Verstappen didn’t agree with the assessment, but it was the way Russell lobbied for the penalty in the stewards’ office on Saturday night that really irked him.
“I find it ridiculous how we wants to make sure I get a penalty,” he vented to Dutch TV on Sunday evening. “You know what it is? He acts decent in front of the camera here, but when you talk to him personally he is it is a different person.
“I can’t stand that. In that case you can better f— off,” Verstappen said.
With his fourth consecutive championship now in the bag, it seems Verstappen’s filter, which was only ever loosely in place, has now been entirely removed.
“I couldn’t believe that I got the penalty,” he vented later on in the FIA’s press conference. “But in a way, I was also like, yeah, I’m not surprised anymore in the world that I live in. I didn’t want to screw anyone over to prepare their lap, and by doing that, being nice, basically you get a penalty. And that’s what I tried to explain as well. But I just felt like I was talking to a brick wall.”
Feeling like he wasn’t being listened to, Verstappen decided to do his talking on the track on race day.
As he lined up on the grid, he positioned his Red Bull to intercept Russell’s path to Turn 1, and after making a perfect getaway he took the inside line and shepherded the Mercedes towards the edge of the track on corner exit. The move nearly opened the door for Norris to take advantage and gain positions on both Russell and Verstappen, but again, his perfect positioning of his Red Bull ensured Verstappen came out on top.
With Russell then struggling, Verstappen’s race was almost entirely with Norris from that point onwards, and for the most part he struggled to shake the McLaren. His performance may have looked serene from the outside, but Verstappen was carefully plotting his way around the lap, knowing that Norris had an advantage onto the pit straight that could result in an overtaking opportunity at Turn 1.
“Most of the first stint, I felt quite good in the first two sectors, but then in the final sector, I think Lando already started pushing a bit more from the beginning of the race and I was managing probably a little bit more,” he said. “But then at one point, of course, he tried to close the gap and I had to push also harder in the last sector.
“But I think still he was being very quick also in the last corner, which has been a little bit of a weakness for us, even in qualifying. So, yeah, it just evened out around the lap, almost every single lap. So, yeah, it was nice. I enjoyed it. It’s just, you know, making sure that you don’t make any mistakes.”
More “karma”, at least from Red Bull’s perspective, came Verstappen’s way when Norris was investigated for failing to slow under yellow flags. The incident happened after Alex Albon’s Williams shed one of its wing mirrors on the pit straight and double-waved yellow flags were shown, presumably because a marshal was preparing to run on the track to retrieve it.
Verstappen spotted the double-waved yellows and backed off, but noticed that when he did so, Norris continued flat out with his DRS overtaking aid wide open. He was quickly on the team radio to send a message to his friends in the stewards’ office that Norris had broken one of F1’s most important safety rules.
“I mean, I knew that I lifted because I saw the double yellow. And I know that, of course, if I wouldn’t have lifted, it would have been investigated straight away,” he said. “So you’re just on it. I mean, yeah, I asked if he lifted because he had a DRS, I think, from a backmarker at the same time as well.
“And then, of course, when we came out of Turn 1, I saw that he was a lot closer. So I just asked the team to check it. I mean, it was just a normal question. And I know, of course, with double yellows, they’re quite strict.”
It took the stewards several laps to investigate the incident, but when they did Norris was banged to rights. A 10-second drive-through penalty was issued, which short of a disqualification, is as strict a penalty as the F1 rulebook allows.
From that point onwards the win was undisputedly Verstappen’s. In some ways a scrappy win, but one that Verstappen will undoubtedly take pride in.
“It’s been nice,” he said. “I mean, it’s still not where I would like it to be in terms of the behaviour of the car compared to last year, but at least now we are back in a fight to win races.
“So if we can just learn from this year’s car, take the positives, of course, from also last year and try to build a better car, I’m sure that we can be again very competitive next year.”
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