Max Verstappen Didn’t Win Last Week. It Made His Season Look Better.
Max Verstappen Didn’t Win Last Week. It Made His Season Look Better.
Why sometimes athletes can be too dominant for their own good.
When Red Bull’s Max Verstappen missed the final stage of qualifying at the Singapore Grand Prix by 0.007 seconds, it took the defending F1 World Champion by surprise.
"Shocking, absolutely shocking experience," Verstappen said on the radio afterwards.
As a result, Verstappen started 11th on the grid and was only able to fight his way to a fifth-place finish, ending his record-breaking streak of consecutive race wins at 10. It was the first time all season that Verstappen had not finished on the podium, and only the third race of the year that didn’t end with him lifting a trophy at the post-race ceremonies.
You might think this stunning result would be a setback in Verstappen’s quest to have the greatest individual season in F1 history. But I think it actually helped how Verstappen’s season might be viewed in the long run. Why? Because there is such a thing as too much dominance in sports.
To no one’s surprise, Verstappen is driving circles around the competition this F1 season. In addition to that record streak of consecutive wins, he is tracking for the highest winning percentage in history — 80%, or 12 wins in 15 races — and a tie with Michael Schumacher’s legendary 2002 campaign for the best average finish (1.4) ever in a modern season (i.e., since 1973).
Amazingly, all of that is after we include Verstappen’s “disappointing” fifth-place finish at Singapore. (Before that, he’d won a staggering 86% of possible races.) Any way you slice it, Verstappen is having an overpowering year even by the standards of a sport that is frequently dominated by just one driver for multiple seasons on end.
But by winning so much, Verstappen has also run the risk of driving into the uncanny valley of video-game numbers — outlier performances so over-the-top and outlandish that they make us wonder if an athlete had things a little bit too easy. There’s a great Bill James anecdote about former Pirates slugger Dick Stuart (in the context of ex-Rockies first baseman Todd Helton and his altitude-aided stats) that illustrates this concept perfectly:
“Dick Stuart one year in the late 1950s hit 66 homers for Lincoln, Nebraska, in the Western League,” he wrote in The Bill James Handbook 2019. “Stuart would say later that when the Pirates had some minor league player who hit 35 homers they would get all excited, but when he hit 66 homers they didn’t know what to say about that, so they just ignored the fact that it had ever happened.”
“Helton’s numbers are like that; they are SO good that nobody knows what to do with them.”
The same can be said for other dominant athletes from throughout history: Think of our ongoing difficulty in contextualizing Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game (and 50.4 PPG average overall) from 1962. Maybe if he had scored a little less, we might not consider the competition to be merely “plumbers and firemen,” to borrow a phrase from JJ Redick.
Dominate in a way we can understand, and it adds to your legend; dominate in a way we can’t, and we might end up holding it against you because we suspect it all came too easily.
So by reminding us that winning is actually very hard, even when you’re a driving prodigy in the best equipment (including teammate Sergio Perez, Red Bull has won 14 of 15 races this season), at the height of an F1 engine and aero era that is perfectly suited to your car, Verstappen’s Singapore finish should make us take his other dominant drives less for granted.
Yes, it still may be “absolutely shocking” when Verstappen isn’t on top. But winning every week isn’t ever automatic at the highest level of motorsports, either. For someone to come as close to that perfect standard as Verstappen has this season should be appreciated while it lasts — even if it takes a jolt of imperfection to demonstrate how special it is.
Filed under: Formula 1