Over the course of this very closely fought 2021 season, an opinion that seems to be shared by most spectators of F1 is that Max Verstappen will one day be World Champion, even if not this year. He has been referred to as a future Champion more times than Yuki Tsunoda has crashed. This got me thinking: do some drivers have the innate ability to win the Championship baked into them? Are there some that will prevail through anything, simply because they have ‘it’? How do we categorise between drivers that seem destined for greatness, and those who are brilliant but fall short of the ultimate prize? We talk of older and ex-drivers having been capable of winning the Championship, but if they truly were capable, wouldn’t they have won?
Of those who haven’t yet won on the current grid, I see potential in Lando Norris, George Russell, and maybe Pierre Gasly and Carlos Sainz. But the two drivers I think are shoe-ins for a title are Verstappen and Charles Leclerc. For me personally, there are two defining performance for the pair that marked them out as future World Champions. For Max, his astonishing drive in the wettest of conditions at Brazil 2016 (a special mention must go to his pass on Nico Rosberg). And for Charles, not to de-value any of his brilliant F1 drives (and quali laps), but it has to be his mind-blowing win of the Bahrain sprint race in F2 in 2017. They both have a magic touch; their driving has this intangible quality of greatness. It’s not just that they are amazing in the car, but that they have something special about them that can’t be put into words. But they can’t become World Champion through this alone.
Despite Ferrari’s recent dip in form, both Verstappen and Leclerc have managed to place themselves as the number one driver in race-winning machinery. In addition to talent, hard work and luck, a World Champion needs to be incredibly astute in terms of what teams they join, and ultimately needs to be able to build the team around them. Would Lewis Hamilton be the most successful driver of all time had he not put his faith in Mercedes and moulded the team to work around him, whilst pushing them forward? Probably not. Despite the huge amounts of (now quite hilarious) critiques at the time that the move to the Silver Arrows was career suicide, Lewis ‘the businessman’ knew what he was doing.
Unfortunately, for Daniel Ricciardo it just hasn’t quite worked out. Often cited as one of the most talented drivers on the grid, talk of his potential to become a World Champion has waned over the years. Even after beating Sebastian Vettel into departure, he did not have enough of a grip on Red Bull for it to remain ‘his’ with the rise of Verstappen. The car was not capable of winning a Championship then, but it is now. Furthermore, had Ricciardo moved straight to McLaren rather than Renault, he could have made the team his own, and I’m confident he would be in a much stronger position for a potential title fight with 2022’s new regulations. That being said, he hasn’t exactly clicked with the MCL35. Being in the right place at the right time is important, and it isn’t just down to luck.
But sometimes, luck is the deciding factor in a World Championship. In 2008 Felipe Massa was very unlucky, and Hamilton was very lucky. This isn’t to discredit Lewis’s victory; they both drove phenomenally all season and both could have won due to their talent, but of course only one could, and it came down to circumstances outside of their control. It all came down to the final race of the season, the Brazilian Grand Prix (a race I can’t actually watch the end of, the switch from elation to desolation on the faces of the Massa family just too much to bare.) If Timo Glock hadn’t elected to remain on dry tyres in the closing stages when the track was becoming increasingly slippy, he wouldn’t have dropped behind Hamilton, and Massa might have been World Champion. Conversely, without Crashgate and Fernando Alonso’s win in Singapore, Lewis might have won even if he stayed behind Glock. And if the fastest lap point was awarded back in the day, Massa would have won the championship by one point (taking three extra points over the course of the season, as opposed to Lewis’ one). Brazil was Massa’s final race win, and 2008 his final attempt at a title; I think like Jenson Button and Nico Rosberg he had the potential for one Championship inside him, and it just didn’t work out.
Fortunately, we seem to have moved far away from the era when fatal accident’s denied their victims, such as Ronnie Peterson and Wolfgang von Tripps, a World Championship. But even without such awful consequences, serious accidents have the potential to derail the careers of extremely promising talents. Just look at Robert Kubica. The Polish driver had impressed for both BMW Sauber and Renault before a horrific off-season rally crash in early 2011. Stuck in the car for over an hour, he suffered multiple injuries and his forearm had to be partially amputated. He has made an astounding recovery, considering the initial fears for his life, returning to F1 for a season with Williams in 2019 and currently acting as a test driver for Alfa Romeo. But whilst Kubica was contracted to remain with Renault for the 2011 season, he confirmed a couple of years ago that prior to the crash, he had signed to join Alonso at Ferrari in 2012. This was an extremely competitive season, with Ferrari and McLaren strong early on and Red Bull catching up to eventually win. With Alonso only finishing three points off Championship winner Vettel, one can’t help but wonder what Kubica could have achieved.
The often cited ‘greatest driver never to be World Champion’, Stirling Moss, relinquished his chance to win in 1958 with a remarkable act of sportsmanship, asking the stewards to overturn his rival Mike Hawthorn’s disqualification from the Portuguese Grand Prix. You would never have seen this behaviour from Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost or Michael Schumacher though, and I doubt we will from Leclerc or Verstappen. They have the absolute will and desire needed to win, and I believe will, whatever the circumstances.
