Max Verstappen claimed his fourth consecutive championship Saturday night, at the conclusion of the Las Vegas Grand Prix. Verstappen came into the race 62 points clear of Lando Norris with three races to go; some truly improbable stuff would've needed to happen over the season's remaining few weeks for Norris to complete the overtake, but at a minimum the McLaren driver needed to finish ahead of Verstappen in Vegas. He could not. Verstappen cruised home in sixth place, half a minute ahead of seventh-place Norris, who surrendered late and took an extra pit stop in order to pursue the point for fastest lap on fresh soft tires, his McLaren team having shifted its attention to holding off Ferrari in the constructor standings.
It was a somewhat anticlimactic conclusion to a championship chase that juiced up the middle third of a Formula 1 season that in its early stages looked like another dreary Red Bull cakewalk. Even as the McLaren plot-line fizzled and it became clear into autumn that Norris's title hopes rested upon Verstappen's car kerploding at some point and then continuing to kerplode on an almost weekly basis, there was still fun to be had in Red Bull's mounting frustration and increasingly visible dysfunction. Then Verstappen had one of the most impressive races of his career in a soaked and chaotic São Paolo Grand Prix, releasing a lot of pressurized angst and giving his inevitable fourth championship its signature moment. São Paolo at least delivered the thrills, even if it all but ended the underdog charge that gave the season its flavor. A Norris win in Las Vegas would've prolonged the chase, but not for very long.
Verstappen is happy to have it over with. "At the moment just feeling relieved in a way, but also very proud," said Verstappen, after some post-race hooting and hollering. "I think in a way, I still preferred last season," a season that featured a dominant Red Bull one-two at the top of the driver standings, and that Verstappen won by more than double the point total of second-place Sergio Pérez. "I enjoyed that a lot, but I think this season definitely has lessons that I'm very proud of." Verstappen does not seem like someone who particularly gives a rip about the cinematic qualities of his triumphs—back in May he said emphatically that he would rather win a race by 20 seconds than in a thrilling wheel-to-wheel battle to the checkered flag—but certainly a limping march entirely devoid of high drama would've stunk for fans.
I can't decide if Max is too ruthless to enjoy a fiercely competitive finish or not ruthless enough, but certainly there are plenty of competitors out there who at least think they are tuned to different ruth settings, who imagine that for them the action is the juice. Verstappen knows himself and likes what he likes, which is to dominate. A field of hard-charging competitors can deliver neck-in-neck drama to spectators, but at the individual level it provides something against which to strive, and to measure oneself. Verstappen prefers for that measuring to tell him that he is so surpassingly superior that his opponents aren't even visible in his rearview mirrors. This season presented him with a buzzing McLaren, but in retrospect this was always a distant annoyance, a long-shot underdog story suffused with hope from a somewhat desperate viewership. It wasn't Verstappen's easiest, best, or most dominant championship, but it's his all the same. For the rest of us, there's always next summer.
