Max Verstappen’s fourth consecutive drivers’ championship was hard-won, but also statistically preordained.
Every driver in Formula 1 history who has won three consecutive championships has gone on to take a fourth, a pattern Verstappen continued last weekend. Among the four drivers he emulated were Juan Manuel Fangio in 1957 and Michael Schumacher in 2003.Verstappen also did the same as the only other driver to win a world championship for Red Bull, Sebastian Vettel, in 2013 and his immediate predecessor as champion, Lewis Hamilton, in 2020. Alain Prost is the only four-time F1 champion who did not win four in a row.
The Red Bull driver has now won two titles on a Sunday and two on a Saturday. Prior to Verstappen’s title-clinching drive in the Qatar sprint race last year, no driver had won the world championship on a Saturday since Keke Rosberg in the 1982 Caesars Palace Grand Prix in Las Vegas. The only driver who won the title outside of a Sunday was Nelson Piquet, who became champion in 1987 when Nigel Mansell’s crash during Friday practice ruled him out of the penultimate round in Japan.
George Russell claimed the third grand prix win of his career and led Mercedes to their first one-two of the season. All this also happened at Spa earlier this year, only for Russell to be disqualified due to a technical infringement.
F1 has set new records for competitiveness this year thanks to Russell’s win. He is the seventh different driver to claim more than one win, beating the 1981 record of six. The only exception among the leading four teams is the entirely win-less Sergio Perez.
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Four different teams have now won four races each, which has also never happened before. But of course this was not possible in 30 of the 76 world championship seasons when fewer than 16 rounds were held.
F1 has now had 13 grands prix without any driver taking back-to-back victories. This last happened from the final round of the 2016 season up to the 12th event of the following year.
Russell’s win came from the fifth pole position of the year (including his 2022 Brazilian Grand Prix pole position, which Formula 1 ignores) and puts him level with Giuseppe Farina, Chris Amon, Clay Regazzoni, Patrick Tambay and Keke Rosberg.
Norris claimed the fastest lap for the fifth time this year. No one else can therefore win the pole position trophy outright this year, though either Verstappen or Leclerc could share it with the McLaren driver.
Pierre Gasly took a remarkable third on the grid for Alpine. This was the second-highest starting position of his career after his sole front row appearance at the 2021 Qatar Grand Prix, when he took second for AlphaTauri (due partly to the damage he picked up on his final lap and the resulting yellow flag it caused).
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Aston Martin’s recent slump continued. They were the slowest team in terms of one-lap pace last weekend and failed to score for fourth event in a row, their worst run since their five-race point-less spell which straddled the 2021 and 2022 campaigns.
The Las Vegas Grand Prix was the 79th world championship round to take place in the United States. The USA, which holds three rounds per season, is now the second most frequent host of grands prix, tied with Britain (one race per year) and Germany (none). However it will take many more years for it to catch up to Italy, which currently holds two races per year and has already staged 107.
Over to you
Have you spotted any other interesting stats and facts from the Las Vegas Grand Prix? Share them in the comments.
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2024 Las Vegas Grand Prix
- Vowles clarifies Colapinto’s claim he was concussed in Las Vegas crash
- Norris lost title because McLaren weren’t competitive enough early on – Stella
- Ferrari are now in their longest-ever championship drought
- F1 “was trying too hard” in first year at Las Vegas – Sainz
- 2024 Las Vegas Grand Prix weekend F1 driver ratings
SpaFrancorchamps (@spafrancorchamps)
27th November 2024, 11:10
Sir Lewis Hamilton will end it for them I’m sure. 2025 will be Ferrari’s year.
F1statsfan (@f1statsfan)
27th November 2024, 11:11
An additional stat that shows 2024 has been a competitive season, 2024 is the first season that sees four different constructors scoring a 1-2 race finish.
asz
27th November 2024, 11:28
And if Verstappen’s car breaks down in Brazil…
Craig
27th November 2024, 11:43
If it had then there may be justification for calling this championship “hard won”, but it really wasn’t.
BMW P85 V10
27th November 2024, 12:07
So you actually think M4x was cruising around just collection some whenever liked to do so?
He might have an easy start of the season, but after Miami he was nowhere in a comfortable position.
Craig
27th November 2024, 12:18
Because he was. Without exceptional circumstances his championship lead was never at risk.
BMW P85 V10
27th November 2024, 12:51
That’s because of his own (and his team) effort, you can’t blame RB/ Max for maximazing their results even if there’s 1, 2 or even 3 teams better at some point. If Norris did do the right thing it would not be Max’ championship to win. He did win it because he took the most out of any situation, which his opponent with the better car failed to do. That was never easy. If it was easy in the RB20 it would have to be a slam dunk in the MCL38.
anon
27th November 2024, 15:35
BMW P85 V10, it’s actually been demonstrated mathematically that, if you are not relying on retirements for the driver leading the WDC to close a points gap, the relatively close spacing in the points means that the driver at the head of the WDC doesn’t actually need to build up that large of a gap in their points tally to have a decisive advantage.
Whilst Red Bull did have a bit of a downturn in competitiveness, it wasn’t actually that detrimental to Verstappen’s chances as he was still finishing within the top 5 most of the time. By the time we got to the Chinese GP, Verstappen’s lead in the WDC was already comfortably large enough that it was statistically very unlikely that Norris could consistently outscore Verstappen by enough points in the remaining races of the season to catch him.
It doesn’t mean he was necessarily taking it easy after that, but rather that he could afford to finish lower down the order than you might think and still have the odds fairly heavily in his favour to win the WDC thanks to that points buffer.
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
27th November 2024, 15:02
I think his point is that alpine would’ve got a 1-2 if anything happened to verstappen that race! Would’ve been 5 teams with a 1-2.
TheNewNo2
27th November 2024, 11:35
Something Crofty mentioned in commentary is this was the 3rd time Las Vegas has seen the championship clinched, and all of them were with a 5th place.
Jere (@jerejj)
27th November 2024, 11:51
What a coincidence.
stefano (@alfa145)
27th November 2024, 12:18
out of a total of 4 races held there, nonetheless
F1statsfan (@f1statsfan)
27th November 2024, 12:34
Max’s possible father in law Nelson Piquet finished 5th in Las Vegas in 1981 winning the championship.
In 1982 Keke Rosberg did the same, finishing 5th and securing the championship in Las Vegas.
However both in 1981 (15 races) and 1982 (16 races) Las Vegas was the final race of the season.
Jere (@jerejj)
27th November 2024, 11:37
The 2022 Sao Paulo GP was also the most recent race where Mercedes took 1-2.
Max Verstappen became the sixth driver to win at least four world championships in F1 history.
Esteban Ocon & Valtteri Bottas were the only lapped drivers like in Baku & coincidently, they also finished in the same respective order, being the last two finishers, albeit two places higher each.
Partly off-topic, but the F1 & WRC championships got clinched on the same weekend for the first time, or at least for the first time in a while, which is some coincidence.
Bob
28th November 2024, 9:09
The F1 and WRC champions both have a Belgian mother.
Jere (@jerejj)
29th November 2024, 7:26
That’s one good coincidence.
Jonathan Parkin
27th November 2024, 12:44
Lance Stroll is now the most experienced Canadian F1 driver surpassing Jacques Villeneuve
black (@black)
27th November 2024, 15:15
Like we couldn’t instantly guess that after seeing the formation lap in Brazil… /s
SPArtacus
27th November 2024, 20:05
Both are/were mediocre, but at least JV had a personality and showed he could succeed in Indy Car.
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
27th November 2024, 15:04
To think ferrari could break this win draught in 1,5 weeks!
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
27th November 2024, 15:06
Ops, drought, not english, so I get confused with those.
SPArtacus
27th November 2024, 20:19
Current odds put Ferrari at 7:2 and RBR at 200:1 (I’d put the latter at 20,000:1 to myself). Checo has 33 points in the last 12 races, including all the sprints. That’s an impressive 2.75 points per weekend. So, at his current rate, even if we pretended that was his average per race, he’d need 19 races with no one else scoring points to cut the gap. I see why Mexican fans are so crazy about him. They think he’s the greatest con artist of all time.
F1statsfan (@f1statsfan)
28th November 2024, 7:17
If you would consider Red Bull on average the 3rd fastest car since Miami than Checo should have scored 16 * 8 points + 3 * 3 points = 137 points for Red Bull by finishing 6th in all races instead of the 49 he actually scored.
Checo didn’t have mechanical failures so there is no real reason why he wouldn’t finish 6th on average unless that Red Bull is really worse than what Max makes us think it is.
SPArtacus
28th November 2024, 10:49
It’s inexplicable.
Frank
28th November 2024, 22:10
Since Miami Perez has finished
8-DNF-DNF-8-7-17-7-7-6-8-DNF-10-17-11-10
I am willing to believe that he can do that series in the third best car’
MichaelN
27th November 2024, 19:35
The more depressing thing about the Ferrari stat is that it’s never been close in the constructor’s championship. Not even in 2012.
A big part of that is the lackluster second drivers they’ve had throughout the years. Through 2010 and 2012, Massa only won* a single race (Germany 2010), and in 2017 and 2018, Räikkönen similarly added a mere single win to the tally (Texas 2018). One might argue he could have also won in Hungary in 2017 had he not played the blocking game for Vettel, who was nursing an issue. Then again, he wasn’t going to win if Vettel hadn’t had that issue. So it kinda cancels each other out.
Hopefully a Leclerc/Hamilton combo finally gets them the line-up they need.
SPArtacus
27th November 2024, 20:22
Raikkonen was ahead of Vettel for much of 2016 despite Raikkonen having terrible luck and him always being left out to block someone else to help Seb’s race. Their other two seasons together were more honestly lopsided.
paulgilb (@paulgilb)
27th November 2024, 20:23
First time Russell has officially managed pole position and win in the same race.
Hamilton’s podium means that New Delhi and Miami are the only circuits where Hamilton has raced but never finished on the podium.
There were no yellow flags in the race.
Leclerc and Sainz have both passed their 2022 points totals.
Zhou’s best start of the season.
Thanks to statsf1 and the official F1 site for some of these.
Jere (@jerejj)
28th November 2024, 5:49
@paulgilb Not having a single yellow flagging is barely note-worthy anymore, & certainly less note-worthy than not having a single SC, VSC, or red-flag neutralization, given how many races this year or in the recent past generally have been like this, so a rule rather than exception most of the time.
SPArtacus
29th November 2024, 4:59
Indeed. It’s probably more likely to get one of the biggies than a yellow flag these days because of the insane new standard that every car recovery requires some sort of stoppage/neutralization.