No one goes to a motor race hoping to see a crash, or so they used to say. It may be less true this weekend, when the promise of mayhem between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen in the final round of the 2021 Formula One world championship promises to attract a vast worldwide television audience.
As they prepare for Sunday’s showdown, Verstappen hoping to become champion for the first time and Hamilton in line to surpass Michael Schumacher with a record eighth title, not just individual career landmarks rest on the outcome. It feels as though much more – perhaps nothing less than the entire culture of the sport – is at stake here.
This is not the first season in which the title has gone down to the final race. It is not even the first in which the two remaining contenders have gone to the starting grid at the last round with an equal number of points against their names. But no race in the long history of Formula One has been awaited with such a mixture of excitement and apprehension.
The two contenders, level on points at the top of the drivers’ standings, have been crashing into each other since the middle of the season, when the reigning champion arrived at Silverstone having decided that he was not going to allow his young Dutch rival to get away with carving him up any longer. Hamilton may be a streetwise racer, but he has always been a clean competitor and to see him answer Verstappen’s intimidatory tactics with some of his own was an indication of how far the rivalry has gone.
If the decision was intended to make his opponent reconsider his approach, it was never likely to work. At 24, Verstappen believes he has waited too long to become world champion. He is already a year older than the age at which, in 2008, Hamilton won the first of his seven titles. Through his style of racing, the Dutchman has made it plain that he follows Ayrton Senna and Schumacher in the belief that nothing and no one should be permitted to stand in the way of his success.
Although they stand level on points after 21 rounds, Hamilton starts with the handicap of knowing that if neither of them finishes this one, Verstappen will be crowned champion by virtue of his nine race wins to eight, raising the possibility of the contest being ended by a collision of which only the Dutchman could be the beneficiary. This week the F1 race director, Michael Masi, stressed that such incidents could be punished by the kind of penalties that might affect championship standings.
Temperatures are certainly running high. Racing drivers of the past have had their armies of supporters, but their allegiance was never expressed with the sustained mutual animosity shown by the fans of Hamilton and Verstappen on social media or the partisan fervour displayed at circuits around the world.
A thick haze of orange smoke is now as common a sight at a grand prix as it has long been at football matches involving the Netherlands or at “Dutch corner” on the Alpe d’Huez. Both drivers are accustomed to hearing boos as they emerge from their cars to be interviewed before making their way to the podium.
The duels between Senna and Alain Prost or Schumacher and Damon Hill produced wrecked cars and angry words, but they were conducted with nothing like the ferocity among F1 fans that is reaching its peak this weekend. That will come as a particular delight to the makers of Formula 1: Drive to Survive, the Netflix documentary series that has attracted a new audience to the sport – particularly in the US – through an emphasis on character-driven narratives, lurid crashes and heightened emotions. Its fourth season is likely to raise the pitch of melodrama to new levels.
If Verstappen wins out, by whatever means, he may become the standard bearer for a new generation of drivers who, moulded by the video games and simulators in which aggressive tactics can be rehearsed and refined without the possibility of physical consequences, no longer play by the old rules.
Drivers of Hamilton’s generation were still partially influenced by the memory of older codes of etiquette, when behaviour on the circuit was regulated not by lines painted on concrete or stewards imposing stop-and-go penalties but by trackside stone walls, trees and ditches. There was also a sense of comradeship among the drivers that crossed the borders of team loyalty and involved a willingness to risk their own lives but not, if they could avoid it, the lives of those with whom they might have shared a hotel breakfast table that morning.
Thirty years ago, those protocols began to break down. The Prost-Senna rivalry saw cynical collisions determine the outcome of the championship in 1989 and 1990. Schumacher won his first title in 1994 after barging into Hill. Three years later he failed in an even more blatant attempt, doing more damage to his own car than to that of Jacques Villeneuve.
These tactics were made possible by the knowledge that cars and circuits had been made much safer in response to the fatalities of the preceding decades. Young drivers trained in karts were introducing the previously unthinkable idea of Formula One as a semi-contact sport. And whereas significant change in motor racing had usually been confined to the technical side, now it was also behavioural.
This season has presented the sport with perhaps its greatest challenge, placing a heavy burden on the shoulders of a rotating cast of stewards whose disciplinary decisions often seem inconsistent and even contradictory. For all the availability of onboard data, they have the task of reading the drivers’ minds and assessing their intentions, a task highlighted last Sunday when Verstappen slowed, ostensibly in response to a demand to let Hamilton overtake, but in such a way that it was impossible to come up with a definitive interpretation of both the initial action and Hamilton’s response.
The questionable state of the disciplinary processes was also exposed in Jeddah when Masi was overheard seeking the approval of the Red Bull team for Verstappen’s grid position at the second restart, a hint of weakness that would never have occurred under his respected predecessor, the late Charlie Whiting.
But as the world watched Hamilton and Verstappen haring away from the rest of the 20-car field last weekend, there was no doubt that here were the two finest drivers of their era. At Interlagos last month Hamilton demonstrated that time has not dimmed his gifts as he fought his way from 10th to first with a concentrated fury that reminded historians of Juan Manuel Fangio’s legendary fightback against the Ferraris at the Nürburgring in 1957.
Verstappen’s brilliance was evident from the moment of his arrival in F1. In Jeddah last Sunday, as a chaotic race was restarted for the second time, he glimpsed an opening at the first corner and sliced past Esteban Ocon’s Alpine and Hamilton’s Mercedes like a shark gobbling shrimps. Also evident, however, were the less widely admired aspects of his deportment on and off the track.
His air of arrogance and entitlement is inherited from his father, Jos, whose achievements as an F1 driver never remotely matched his own estimation of his abilities. An equally powerful role in Verstappen’s career has been played by Dr Helmut Marko, an Austrian whose own highly promising career was cut short when he lost an eye in a grand prix accident in 1972 and who has since fashioned the Red Bull driver training programme into the most unsparingly effective scheme of its kind since the Spartans left male babies out on a hillside to see which of them would survive to be trained as warriors.
Christian Horner, the Red Bull team principal, has proved willing to defend Verstappen’s behaviour in all circumstances. This week’s claim that his driver is fighting an opponent in a superior machine looks disingenuous when considered alongside the revision of the current technical regulations which favoured the basic design concept of the Red Bull against that of the Mercedes.
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Few outside Abu Dhabi and F1’s finance department will rejoice that the final act of a sometimes horrifically mesmerising season is taking place on a track all too typical of the bland computer-designed facilities inflicted on F1 over the past 25 years rather than a traditional circuit based on a more varied set of natural topographic features. Although the elimination of some of the fiddlier corners this year represents an attempt to create more opportunities for overtaking, it’s still a bit like accepting $50m to hold the Olympic downhill ski race on an artificial slope in Milton Keynes.
But as Hamilton and Verstappen pull down their visors and twilight creeps over the Persian Gulf, looking away is not an option. In an atmosphere so fraught with tension and expectation, the 13th Abu Dhabi Grand Prix is likely to be the hardest to forget.