- Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen will resume battle this weekend as the two fight for the F1 world title.
- Hamilton is eight points ahead of the Dutchman who has earned just five points in the last two races combined.
- There are 12 races left of a gripping 2021 season starting with the Belgian GP this weekend.
The last time Lewis Hamilton had a serious contender for the World Drivers’ Championship, Max Verstappen was just 18 years old.
Now, after a four-week-long summer break, Hamilton and Verstappen prepare to lock horns once again as Formula One returns at the Belgian Grand Prix.
While Hamilton fought, and eventually lost to, teammate Nico Rosberg for the 2016 title, Verstappen was establishing himself as one to watch in the sport. He won his first ever race for Red Bull, crossing the line first in Barcelona.
From that moment, many considered it almost guaranteed that Verstappen would become F1’s youngest ever world champion, besting Germany’s Sebastian Vettel’s record by winning before the age of 23.
His career since that first victory, however, has been a story of frustration.
The occasional win was all he and his team Red Bull could realistically hope for. In 2020, all but four of the 17 races were won by Mercedes and of those four, only two were won by Verstappen.
This week, Red Bull chief technical officer Adrian Newey said Verstappen had the “steely grit” of a world champion but it is not until this year that he finally has a car to prove it.
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The start of the 2021 season saw first place trophies shared between Hamilton and Verstappen with the Brit winning three to the Dutchman’s two. The race in Baku, Azerbaijan in early June was a turning point.
Both drivers finished out of the points — Hamilton in 15th and Verstappen in 18th — but from then on Red Bull wrestled control of the title race away from Mercedes.
A hat-trick of wins for Verstappen pushed the 23-year-old 32 points clear of Hamilton and had the usually unflappable Toto Wolff resorting to ominous warnings of his team being just “one DNF” away from a title fight.
Wolff would be proved right, but he perhaps had not predicted the circumstances of that DNF.
Coming into his home grand prix, Hamilton would have been disappointed not to qualify in pole position and perhaps it was this disappointment, mixed with a fear of a championship slipping away from him, that caused him to try an overly aggressive move on the first lap of the race.
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Hamilton’s front left wheel collided with Verstappen’s rear right and sent the Red Bull driver on course for a 51G impact with the Silverstone boundary and out of the race.
Despite needing to be taken to hospital, Verstappen did recover for the Hungarian Grand Prix only to be effectively taken out of the race by Hamilton’s Mercedes teammate Valterri Bottas.
He limped home with a damaged car to finish in ninth while Hamilton managed a second place finish and moved himself above Verstappen in the drivers’ championship standings as the sport finished for a summer break.
With the break now over, all eyes turn to Spa-Francochamps in Belgium’s Ardennes forest, and both teams are unwilling to yield an inch.
Wolff has promised his team will “leave nothing on the table.” while his opposite number, Christian Horner, said it is not in his team’s culture to “give up” but there can be no denying, momentum is with Mercedes.