Photo: © IMAGO
Max Verstappen offered a brutal verdict on his rivals’ tactics in 2024, having stormed to a fourth consecutive world championship title.
Verstappen claimed nine victories throughout 2024, sealing the championship with two races to spare, as his dominance over the rest of the field continued.
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However, his fourth title was arguably his hardest-earned yet, with Red Bull suffering a dramatic drop off in performance which left the Dutchman scrambling for top-five finishes.
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Verstappen suffered a 10-race winless streak, which allowed Lando Norris and McLaren back into the championship fight.
Max Verstappen is now a four-time world champion
Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri form a formidable driver pairing
To celebrate Verstappen’s fourth championship, click here to pre-order the official champion cap, as worn by the Red Bull driver following his championship-winning drive in Las Vegas.
Verstappen’s ‘nonsense’ McLaren verdict
Norris won four races in 2024, the first four victories of his career, while team-mate Oscar Piastri secured two as McLaren won the constructors’ championship for the first time since 1998.
The teamwork between the two McLaren drivers was crucial for their success in the teams’ standings, but may have hampered Norris’ chances of overturning the huge deficit he had to Verstappen in the drivers’ championship.
At the Hungarian Grand Prix, for example, Norris was implored by his team to give up a certain race victory to Piastri, after the team had undercut Piastri with Norris earlier in the race, with Norris eventually obliging.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella later implemented a ‘papaya rules’ verdict, which allowed Norris and Piastri to race each other, but only in a respectful and clean manner, in order to try and protect the team’s constructors’ challenge.
Now, Verstappen, who has not faced a championship challenge from a team-mate in his career, has said that he would tell his race engineer to ‘shut up’ if they implemented such a strategy at Red Bull.
The four-time world champion has been vocal about the way Piastri was treated in 2024, and is expecting a championship challenge from both McLaren drivers in 2025.
“This is another nonsense quote,” Verstappen said in an interview with Viaplay.
“‘Papaya rules’, that’s totally useless to me. If I heard that from an engineer I’d tell him to just shut up immediately.
“Yeah, exactly, what kind of nonsense is this? ‘You’re allowed to race’ is fine. You know they should’ve solved this in a way easier and better way as a team.”