Max Verstappen’s hopes of retaining his drivers’ championship title are slim but very much alive. His victories in Baku and Monza leave him 69 points behind Oscar Piastri with 199 available.
The Red Bull driver is already a four-times world champion. Not all F1 drivers get the chance to drive a potentially championship-winning car, but Verstappen has, and has never failed to capitalise on the opportunity when he’s had it.
Verstappen arrived in F1 with Red Bull’s second team, then known as Toro Rosso, in 2015. Operating exclusively as a ‘kindergarten’ for upcoming Red Bull drivers, it was never likely to contend for the world championship.
He moved to Red Bull at the fifth round of 2016 and famously won on his debut. However that came about thanks to the dominant Mercedes duo Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg crashing on the first lap: they won all bar one of the remaining races, so Red Bull were clearly not going to win the title that year.
This remained the case in 2017 and 2018 as Red Bull were hamstrung by their Renault-sourced power units and Ferrari emerged as the main rivals to Mercedes. A switch to Honda power raised Red Bull’s level from 2019, but they were still not competitive enough to be regarded as championship contenders, and that remained the case in 2020.
However when Mercedes struggled to adapt to a change in the floor regulations in 2021, Red Bull capitalised, and Verstappen fought a bitter battle with Hamilton for the drivers’ title. The contest was swung, notoriously, by a mistake at race control in the final race, but Verstappen’s dogged pursuit of the crown had kept him in the hunt in the face of Mercedes’ late-season onslaught.
He hasn’t let his crown slip since then. Verstappen has converted every realistic shot at a title which has come his way.
That makes him unusual even among the select group of drivers who won the world championship. Who was the last world champion who never missed a title chance? Arguably you have to go back to a driver who some compared Verstappen to even before he made his F1 debut: Ayrton Senna.
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Nico Rosberg
World champion in 2016
The last new champion before Verstappen also wrested the title away from Hamilton. However Hamilton’s title wins in 2014 and 2015 have to be considered missed opportunities for Nico Rosberg, who had the same car but followed his team mate home too often.
Sebastian Vettel
World champion in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013
Like Verstappen, Sebastian Vettel won four world championships on the trot. But could he have had more?
Potential titles slipped through his fingers at Ferrari in 2017 and 2018. However his first season at Red Bull has to be considered the most clear-cut missed opportunity: Jenson Button took the title by 11 points (in the last season when a win was worth 10) but Vettel had squandered more than that by crashing in Australia and Monaco, and following his team mate home in Spain, Turkey, Germany and Brazil.
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Jenson Button
World champion in 2009
Late in 2008 it looked like Jenson Button’s career would end without him ever getting the chance to win a world title. Then came the extraordinary sequence of events which led to the resurrection of Honda’s team as Brawn and his charge to the 2009 title.
Did he have another genuine title shot after then? The following season has to be considered a missed opportunity. He joined Hamilton at McLaren and finished 42 points behind champion Vettel. Button had given away 61 points to his team mate over the course of the year, excluding Monaco (where his car broke down) and Spa (where Vettel took him out) so a title defence was possible for him that year.
Lewis Hamilton
World champion in 2008, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020
After back-to-back titles in 2014 and 2015, Hamilton let the title slip to Rosberg the following year. Unreliability didn’t help but nor did a series of poor starts, any one of which could have made the difference in a title fight decided by just five points.
As is the case with several other champions listed below, there were potentially further missed opportunities for Hamilton to win titles at prior points in his career.
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Kimi Raikkonen
World champion in 2007
After his sensational title win in 2007, Kimi Raikkonen took a pasting from team mate Felipe Massa the following year. While Massa missed the title by just one point (upcoming court case notwithstanding), Raikkonen languished 22 points behind his team mate. Factoring out the team orders at Interlagos and his exhaust failure at Magny-Cours, Raikkonen still lost too many points to his team mate at Bahrain, Istanbul, Monaco, Hockenheimring, Spa, Monza and Singapore.
Fernando Alonso
World champion in 2005 and 2006
It’s often been said that for the sake of 11 points Fernando Alonso is a two-times world champion instead of a five-times winner. He was two points off in 2007 (under the previous scoring system), five away in 2010 and four in 2012.
That most recent defeat must rank as one of the toughest any runner-up has faced, as Alonso drove the wheels off his F2012 to end the season as close to Vettel as he did. Either of his first-lap eliminations at Suzuka and Spa, for which he was blameless, could have tipped the balance.
However the other title he missed at Ferrari has to be regarded as winnable. He missed out by five points, and while his tactics in the final race at Yas Marina clearly contributed, his missed opportunity at Spa was even more decisive. While team mate Felipe Massa came fourth, Alonso crashed out of eighth place with six laps to go.
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Mika Hakkinen
World champion in 1998 and 1999
Like Alonso, Mika Hakkinen’s two world championships were undoubtedly his first opportunities to win the crown. He probably only had one realistic shot to win again after then, in 2000.
Michael Schumacher beat him to the title by 20 points that year. Though Hakkinen had poor reliability early on, he also lost 17 points to his team mate over the British, Monaco and French grands prix. In reality, Schumacher clinched the title by getting ahead of Hakkinen at Suzuka: but the opposite scenario was entirely plausible.
Jacques Villeneuve
World champion in 1997
While it’s fair to say Jacques Villeneuve made hard work of winning the 1997 world championship with a dominant car, he impressed the year before by almost beating experienced team mate Damon Hill to the crown in his rookie season. That inexperience told in races like Brazil and Monaco where errors cost him significant ground.
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Damon Hill
World champion in 1996
If Williams’s decision to drop Damon Hill looked harsh at the end of his championship-winning season, it wouldn’t have 12 months early after he squandered a clear shot at the title but lost badly to Schumacher. He earned more sympathy with his narrow 1994 defeat, coming in the aftermath of the crash which claimed the life of his team mate Ayrton Senna.
Michael Schumacher
World champion in 1994, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004
Schumacher started his final race as a Ferrari driver within a slim chance of winning an eighth world championship, but Alonso prevailed. Both had maximised their points totals remarkably well over the course of the season, but Schumacher could have prevailed over his rival, who beat him by 14 points.
Two qualifying sessions made a significant difference. Schumacher’s team mate Massa out-qualified him at Istanbul which left him vulnerable to an early Safety Car period. Schumacher should have gained six points on Alonso there.
In Monaco the damage was self-inflicted: Schumacher was sent to the back of the grid for parking in qualifying in an attempt to prevent Alonso beating his pole position time. Although he recovered from there to finish fifth, had he accepted second and finished there he’d have been four points better off. More points were lost through incidents in Melbourne and at the Hungaroring which would have tipped the balance.
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Nigel Mansell
World champion in 1992
It looked like Nigel Mansell’s career would be defined by championship near-misses at the end of 1991. He could have been champion that year as well as 1986 and 1987.
Misfortune played a role at times – most famously in that 1986 finale – but on other occasions he didn’t come away with the best possible result. For example, he crashed out of that year’s season finale while team mate Nelson Piquet won.
Ayrton Senna
World champion in 1988, 1990 and 1991
Did Ayrton Senna ever miss a winnable championship title? He didn’t have a championship-winning car in his Lotus days, and Williams’ ascendancy in the early nineties meant he wasn’t realistically in contention in 1992 and 1993. Although Senna joined Williams in 1994 he was tragically killed soon afterwards.
If Senna missed a chance to win a title it only happened once, in 1989. But even though he lost that title to his team mate that year, circumstances did not play in his favour.
No doubt Senna made things difficult for himself from the off by colliding with Gerhard Berger in his first race as defending champion, while Prost took six points for second place. But from then on he was hard to fault.
Senna won the next three races at Imola, Monaco and Mexico City. His car failed in the next four rounds, three of which Prost won. After winning in Germany, Senna let three points slip when Mansell passed him to win in Hungary, then suffered another car failure at Monza.
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Portugal was hugely controversial: Mansell was being shown the black flag when he and Senna collided. Senna hit back with victory in Spain, but still trailed Prost by 16 points with two races to go.
The ‘best 11 results count’ rule at least meant Senna knew he could take the title if he won the final two races. But when he moved to pass Prost for the lead at Suzuka his team mate turned in, triggering a collision and leading to Senna’s deeply controversial disqualification.
Aside from his error in the season-opener, Senna never lost points to Prost in 1989 except due to technical failures or the bizarre circumstances of Portugal. It’s hard to envisage a realistic scenario where Senna could have had the misfortune he did in 1989 and still beaten a team mate of Prost’s ability to the world championship.
That said, this kind of analysis is always going to be subjective. But if 1989 was a winnable title for Senna, who was the last champion who never missed a title-winning opportunity?
And will Verstappen still be able to make this claim at the end of 2025? It remains to be seen whether this year’s title is winnable for him.
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