2021: The crowning glory
Season: 22 races, 10 wins, 10 poles, 6 fastest laps, 18 podiums
Drivers championship: 1st place, 395.5 points
With the clock counting down on its supply of power units, Red Bull moved heaven and earth to achieve a deal allowing them to keep using Honda engines as legacy components until the regulations were next changed in 2025. In the meantime they also made another crucial decision, this time to drop Verstappen's underperforming team mate Albon for someone from outside the Red Bull driver development programme in the form of Sergio Perez. For the first time, Verstappen found himself supported by an experienced and capable driver with nothing to prove and no illusions about what he was being asked to do in support of Verstappen.
Heading into the season opener in Bahrain, everyone complacently assumed that it would be another cruise to title supremacy for Hamilton and the Mercedes team. Sure enough they won three out of the first four races of the season, with Verstappen only coming out on top at Emilia Romagna. But then Red Bull won five races back to back - four victories for Verstappen and one for Perez, who did precisely the job he'd been hired to do when he successfully stepped in at Azerbaijan when both Max and Lewis failed to finish in the points. Red Bull was no longer a one-man band.
Emboldened by this success and by Mercedes' strange mid-season disappearance, Verstappen went on to secure a total of ten wins in 2021 - as many as he had achieved in the past five seasons put together. The driver who hadn't managed to start on pole position for the first six years of his F1 career now picked up ten in a single season. Hamilton rebounded to stage a mighty defence, but the closer it got in the points the harder Verstappen fought - arguably too hard at some points, touches of that old red mist seeping through. It culminated in a showdown for the ages in which Verstappen finally managed to overcome the one immovable object left remaining in his path between him and the title he has craved since he was a little boy playing in the paddock.
Lewis Hamilton had been denied a record eighth title. Now the question forming on everyone's lips is, how long will it take before Verstappen is himself in a position to contend for the title of Greatest Of All Time? Sooner than you think, we'd wager.
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