10 August 2023 , 17:36
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Max Verstappen has been warned against complacency despite his humongous lead in the Formula 1 standings.
At the summer break, the Dutchman is 125 points clear of his nearest rival in the drivers' standings. And that is his team-mate Sergio Perez, still in second place despite the collapse of his title challenge.
Red Bull have a perfect record so far this season, winning all 12 races while Verstappen was responsible for 10 of those dozen victories. He's on an eight-race winning streak and could break the record of nine, set in the 2013 season by his Red Bull predecessor Sebastian Vettel.
Verstappen looks to already have the drivers' title in the bag, while only a miracle will stop his team from also winning the constructors' championship. Red Bull could feasibly win every race this season – something that has never been done before in F1.
With that incredible achievement up for grabs, Nico Rosberg has warned Verstappen against taking his eye off the ball despite his huge lead. "He generally needs to be careful that he doesn't get complacent," said the 2016 champion on the Sky Sports F1 podcast.
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"He's in such an incredible flow where no one can touch him – and that's usually when there's a risk of getting complacent, and you lose a bit of motivation. So he just needs to be a bit careful of that."
Rosberg went on to specify, though, that he believes Verstappen is too focussed as a person to allow that complacency to creep in, adding: "But I don't see that happening because the state of mind that he has is phenomenal and he's just so focused and so in the zone all the time. It's like art. It's amazing."
Verstappen's consistency is amazing to another ex-F1 champion, Jacques Villeneuve, who believes even Lewis Hamilton has never displayed such an unrelenting dominance of the sport. "He's never had a perfect year like Verstappen," said the Canadian of the Mercedes driver.
"Verstappen has always been like that, for years. He's at his best for the whole season. It's hallucinating how he does it, maybe only [Fernando] Alonso was comparable. If you look at most of the other drivers they all have ups and downs, often with quite a bit of difference between them. Not him.... When he is like that, which is practically all the time, he is unbeatable."