Red Bull’s reigning three-time world champion helps Autosport ‘correct’ our ranking of the best successes of his Formula 1 victories to date
ALEX KALINAUCKAS
FORMULA 1MAX VERSTAPPEN
“ It’s tough to remember all of them!” That’s what happens when you put a Formula 1 driver who’s clinched 54 grand prix victories on the spot.
After Autosport had ranked Max Verstappen’s top 10 race wins when he hit 50 with his Austin triumph last year – he took 181 races to reach that target, compared to Lewis Hamilton’s 185 and Michael Schumacher’s record-holding 153 – we were due to interview the Dutchman at the next event in Mexico.
After covering the many topics of his historic F1 season, we deployed a prop: a printed list of the races we’d selected for an article exclusive to Autosport.com. He didn’t hesitate, asking for our pen to “mark what I think was my best”. And so, here we present Verstappen’s own picks.
There’s one important caveat: Verstappen was only reworking our original selection (see panel), so there’s every chance that with a clean slate he might make some different choices. Our long-list ‘near-misses’ of the 2017 Mexican GP, 2018 Austrian GP or 2023 Belgian GP, for example. He also switched out our choice of the 2022 Japanese GP, which we’d included to represent his wet-weather brilliance when a victory as wild as the 2019 German GP had missed out.
What’s clear is that Verstappen considers his best battling drives as more worthy than races he dominated, whereas we’d had several events he’d utterly dominated higher up. It’s also important to consider how our list had been compiled by taking in Verstappen’s various experience levels at the time, the respective machinery at his disposal, the challenges he faced on any given weekend, as well as the nature of his successes. We’d also factored in his opposition strength and championship circumstances at the time of each win.
A couple of his most famous triumphs are also missing – ultimately because Verstappen didn’t make the critical difference. These are the 2021 Abu Dhabi GP and 2016 Spanish GP, although in a chat post-interview in Mexico he agreed he’d also discount his first F1 success, given it required the dominant Mercedes pair to first collide.
102020 ABU DHABI GP
RED BULL RB16 STARTED 1ST
Verstappen start 119
Verstappen win 10
The 2020 Abu Dhabi race was far from a classic GP. We call
