The best season I’ve ever seen

Max Verstappen’s rivals praised his performance this year after the Red Bull driver won his fourth consecutive championship.

“I think he has had the best season I have ever seen from a driver,” said his team mate Sergio Perez, who lies eighth in the championship with 251 points less than Verstappen. “Because a lot of the time we did not have the best car and Max made the difference a lot of weekends.

“The way he pushed the team forwards, he was just a pure force. I think this has been the best year from him in the four we have been together. He has been tremendous, well done to him for all the success he has had, he deserves it.”

Red Bull began the season strongly and Verstappen won seven of the first 10 races. But victories became harder to come by from then on: Verstappen has only triumphed in one of the last 12 rounds.

Lando Norris, Max Verstappen, Las Vegas Strip Circuit, 2024 — **Report: Norris says four-time champion Verstappen “doesn’t have a weakness”**

This weekend’s race winner George Russell said he thought Verstappen would have to wait until the final race to clinch the title as Lando Norris closed on him over the second half of the season.

“He had a dominant car at the start of the year and he got the wins when he needed to and then genuinely thought he probably wasn’t going to win this championship. And he delivered week in, week out, and got the best result the car was capable of and his rivals didn’t.

“I thought it was going to go right to the wire, and he won with [two] races to go. So huge congrats to him.

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“We’ve just got to make sure that we get ourselves in that fight. And give him a harder time. Because it’s about time, I think we feel ready to try and take that challenge to the front.”

Carlos Sainz Jnr, who made his F1 debut alongside Verstappen at Red Bull’s second team Toro Rosso (now RB) in 2015, said his former team mate undoubtedly deserved his success.

“He’s driven for four years now at an incredibly high level,” said Sainz. “I think this year he just dominated whenever he had a dominant car and then he didn’t do mistakes and maximised the points that he could get with a less-performing car and just did whatever he had to do in every race. And congrats because he clearly deserves it.”

Verstappen’s run of four consecutive championships began in 2021, when he beat Lewis Hamilton to the title in controversial circumstances. The Mercedes driver said his former championship rival had “done a fantastic job” this year. “He’s not made any mistakes and he’s delivered every time and [taken] every point he’s supposed to.

“Him and his team have done the best job, again, fourth year in a row. It definitely got exciting at one point. I think they will be hard to beat next year because they probably started earlier than everyone else developing next year’s car as well. But I’m really happy for him.”