There are skeptics and then there are those who believe that Max Verstappen has only won the three Formula 1 world championship titles that appear on his record because he drives a Red Bull. That argument is true, but only partially, and to realize this you just have to compare the numbers of the current champion with those of Checo Pérez, his teammate in the Red Buffalo garage. While the Dutchman has won seven of the ten races that have been contested so far and in all the sprint (three), the Mexican has not won since last year (Baku), where, precisely, he celebrated his only victory in a short race. With the Jalisco driver out of focus – he is fifth in the points table, with almost half the loot of his workshop neighbor -, Verstappen is no longer sweeping as he did in the last two years, riding one of the most dominant cars in the history of the competition. What happens is that the boy from Hasselt has had work to do because the RB20, the car projected by Red Bull for this 2024, has lost that untouchable status. The new sensation is the MCL38, the bet with which McLaren begins to look like the legendary team that it was, the one that throughout its almost six decades of life has been able to accumulate 12 drivers’ titles and eight constructors’ titles.
In Austria, where this Sunday (3:00 p.m., Dazn) the eleventh stop of the calendar will take place, Verstappen dressed as a superhero to contain the hugs of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri in the third short test of the course, in which he again It is clear that the papaya car is going like a shot, and that the British team is at the level of the best (Red Bull) when it comes to revitalizing the prototype, which this weekend has a new front wing. If Norris and Piastri didn’t take that half victory It was because of the immeasurable level of Mad Maxwho knows how to win and knows how to suffer when the road gets steep. After defending his position like a wild boar against the attacks of the McLaren pair, Verstappen took another step in qualifying to add his eighth pole of the season, with a margin of four tenths, enormous, given that it is such a short track (4.3 kilometres). Norris will start next to him again, while Carlos Sainz will be fourth and Fernando Alonso, 15th. “Max is in another dimension,” was the phrase most repeated by the rivals of the leader of the general classification. The eighth place will be occupied by Pérez, who has the same weapons as the holder of the title. pole once again highlights the level of excellence of Red Bull’s main claim.
Verstappen’s route to his fourth title is slightly complicated. The unexpected guest is McLaren, a structure that he has been able to reinvent itself in recent years, and that appears to be one of the neatest of all. Under the leadership of Zak Brown, a racing lover who triumphed in the business world, basically in the field of sports marketing, the third most successful team in the championship emerges strongly from a crisis that was about to take it away. , and which even led him to have to sell (2021) the Technology Center, its headquarters and the jewel in the crown, for 197 million euros, even though it remains there on a rental basis. Thanks to the order that Brown imposed, with painful decisions such as layoffs, a direct consequence of the entry into the scene of the budget limit, McLaren has been revitalizing itself internally and that has had a direct influence on its car, which since 2012 had to wait almost a decade for win again (Ricciardo, in Monza 2021). The victory a couple of months ago in Miami (Norris) confirmed that the company has found a powerful car in its belly (Mercedes) and that it is already the best of all in slow corners.
“I don’t see any weak point in the McLaren,” said Sainz, last week, from Montmeló. There, McLaren literally rose from the ashes after Saturday’s tremendous scare. A short circuit in the false ceiling of the kitchen of the corporate pavilion caused a fire that forced the emergency services to intervene quickly. Obviously, these types of accidents are never welcome, but even less so in the first race of a triplet. Despite the misfortune, the Woking troop was just two seconds away from ecstasy, a trifle if we take into account that a year before, Verstappen crossed the finish line with an advantage of 24 seconds over the second (Hamilton).
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