369.5
In the hot and dark Arabian night, a sweaty and exhausted Lewis Hamilton could barely lift his winner’s trophy. Fireworks and light shows and drones tried their best to make something some creative director somewhere would describe as “a spectacular”, but really they needn’t have bothered.. For those 50 laps transcended the notion of “spectacular” entirely. And it was Lewis Hamilton, at the end, through all of the chaos, who had crossed the finish line before all of the others.
As Hamilton raised the trophy wearily to the jet black desert sky, to his right, Max Verstappen, a man 12 years his junior and just a boy when Hamilton was winning his first F1 races, stepped down from the second place podium rostrum with disgust and regret and walked back towards his garage wondering just why the world keeps wronging him.
And it was so. With Lewis Hamilton 1st and Max Verstappen 2nd at the Saudi Arabia Grand Prix, after the most chaotic of races (and a further 20 before it) two drivers, one the greatest of all time and the other the potential to be so, are locked tied together in first place on 369.5 F1 World Championship points going into the final round of the greatest season in Formula One history.
We have had title fights and intense rivalries in Formula One before. Moss v Fangio. Clark v Hill. Lauda v Hunt. Mansell v Piquet. Schumacher v Hill. Their mere mention conjures up black and white or over-saturated colour memories, Murray Walker commentaries, crashes and press conference barbs. Like the stories of a medieval city, they are as entwined and part of the fabric of what Formula One is as much as the cars, the tracks and the engines. And yet, despite this huge weight of history, Hamilton v Verstappen feels altogether in a different league. Genuinely, even, more incredible than what is always considered the benchmark: Ayrton Senna v Alain Prost.
A combustible concoction of serendipitous events has lead us to the point where, already with the narrative of the GOAT senior v the GOAT junior in the background, we have caught them both right as they are, just about, at their peaks (one having just risen to it and one about to fall away from it). Verstappen’s team, Red Bull, also had the chance to catch up with the dominant Mercedes team in the technology race, due to the fact that Covid-19 had delayed the implementation of radially new F1 rules until the 2022 season (a move, ironically, that is an attempt to make the action more exciting). Further, the tracks this season diverged from the norm as a result of Covid-19, leaving us with no way of knowing which way this Championship could have gone if the Chinese, Canadian, Singapore, Japanese and Australian Grands Prix had all gone ahead. On such butterfly wings is history then changed.
So here we have ended up, with both rival drivers in two seemingly on-par cars. Such a rarity in F1 that it has many racking their brains as to when the last time, if ever, this was the case with two of the sport’s greatest drivers at the peak of their powers. Some have noted that, as a result of a catastrophic weekend at Imola in 1994, history never got to see Senna v Schumacher — two others considered the greatest of all time and, too, up there with the most ferocious in doing anything to win — and we are now lucky enough to experience something similar to this fantasy scenario in real life. Perhaps this is true. But, really, fantasy or otherwise, we still never have and possibly never will, see anything quite like this again.
The reason? Hamilton and Verstappen are so far ahead of the other drivers on the grid that it sometimes seems like F1 is, at the moment, a multi-class series with two cars at the top and then everyone else. When they are both together at the front, it is almost always well over 30 seconds ahead of their team-mates in supposedly identical machines, pouring cold water all over the oft-trotted out complaint that F1 is only ever “all about the car”. Such is their dominance, it is entirely conceivable for Verstappen to finish on the podium a record number of times in a season and still not win the title. Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen are, as a result of nothing but their own skill, on a completely different atmospheric stratification level above everyone else. Because of this, each of them now knows that if they ever, genuinely, are to become considered the best, they need to beat the other now.
We have now reached a point where each driver knows that this is simply it. This is flatout sport, in its rawest and purest form. Despite F1 naturally having so many variables and so many moving parts (and notwithstanding the bullshit and politics), we are now down to a straight shootout to see who can drive two roughly equal cars around a track the fastest after 190 miles. Simply put, whoever is better at driving a Formula One car will win it all.
This causes pressure. Because how often can we really say — in any sport, but especially in motorsport — there is a basically level playing field, without artificality, in any contest between the greatest ever? It is a rare thing that sparks memories and extraordinary iconic moments. Our competitors know that this is the moment where they really could be called “the best”. No disputes. No mitigating circumstances. No “well, if x had y it would have been different”. Not just career defining, but era defining. As a result, they need to dig even deeper than the already extraordinary depths that they have. And this digging deeper goes past mere skill. It goes past mere talent. It has reached a point where it can be pushed too far and where it can all end up in spectacular failure when there’s the slightest unbalance on the knife’s edge.
Such was Verstappen’s determination in digging as deep as possible, he ditched all logic, all sensibility, by pushing right to the limit and nudging past it as he overcooked into the final corner of his qualifying lap and ended up in the wall. Over 1000 team personal, 100s of engineers, hundreds of millions of pounds. Slack messages and Monday team huddles. Everything accurately predicted and calculated to the nth degree. All of it falling on one final moment where one young man knew that he had chance to win a place in history for something so daring, fast and extraordinary that he pushed himself to a level never before seen in order to pursue it, only at the last second for his wings to burn up and come crashing down to the earth. He didn’t need to do it. Not really. Starting second on the grid was never going to be a catastrophic disadvantage in the context of winning The Championship. A bigger crash impact and he could have wrecked his gearbox and thence a chance in the Grand Prix. But he needed to show him. He needed to show them. He needed to show himself: that he had yet another level. He messed up, to paraphrase Daniel Brühl’s Niki Lauda during the opening sequence of Rush, “when he was chasing him, like an asshole…”
Earlier in the season, so determined was Hamilton to win his home grand prix against the greatest challenger he has ever faced, a glory that far suppasses a mere 25 points or a gold goblet, he too pushed beyond the limit as they battled to and fro with each other. Perhaps, as some might argue, he “got away with it?” Maybe. But, like any of the very most successful sportspeople, Hamilton knew that it wasn’t up for him to decide. The instinct is to win. To snatch glory. To be the home hero. Everything else is secondary.
And throughout the season, there have been these flashpoints and boilovers. Controversy and debates. But now, as happens so rarely, but is always tantalisingly possible in sport, we now have both drivers level on points going to the final fixture, the final fight, the final match, the final round and the final race. Verstappen v Hamilton is not a slugfest, titan battle, an all out war or even a quest to immortality. This is a unique moment in time where two of the best in history crossed paths in the timeline. This is not just about the Formula One World Driver’s Championship. It never has been. This is about something far greater but also far more simple…
It is about beating the other guy.
