Max Verstappen will need help from his great F1 rival to beat Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri to the title.
Max Verstappen hopes to get some help from his old rival Lewis Hamilton and others in his bid to win the Formula 1 title for a fifth consecutive year. The Dutchman is third in the championship but is still in outside contention for the drivers’ championship, 36 points behind leader Lando Norris with four rounds remaining.
Ahead of the first of those events, this weekend’s Brazilian Grand Prix, Verstappen admitted he will need “a little bit of luck” to stop Norris and Oscar Piastri ahead of him. And he joked that “it would be nice” if Hamilton and his Ferrari team, as well as George Russell at Mercedes, can also take some points off the McLaren pair.
He said: “First of all, we also need ot be faster than McLaren to the end of the season to close the gap down. We had some good rounds where the gap came down, but now, to the end with four races, it’s still a pretty big gap and I need to score a lot more points every single weekend, which is not that straightforward.
“If you would give me the 2023 season with how everything was, and you tell me I’m 36 points behind with four races to go, I’m like, ‘Yeah, no problem, easy,’ but this season has been a little bit different. So it comes down to us optimising everything and nailing the weekend.
“Besides that, probably we need a little bit of luck at one round. You have to create a bigger [points] offset, but we’re going to give it our all. If that’s going to be enough at the end of the year, I don’t know, but there’s also not much to lose. I mean, worst case, we are P3 and best case, you will win the championship.”
Verstappen wants to become only the second driver in F1 history to win the championship in five consecutive seasons, after Michael Schumacher managed it for Ferrari in the early-2000s. But he knows he is not the favourite to do so with McLaren having had the quickest car for much of the year.
He added: “For me, there’s no pressure. Even if I don’t win it, I still know that I drove a really good season. I think it will be very tough, so you just need to be realistic in the chances that we had throughout the season.
“To still be talking about being in this fight I think is already remarkable in the first place, and yeah for sure it has to do with the turnaround of the team, they never gave up and that’s a strength of the team. I think it’s very impressive.”
