Williams Racing driver Alex Albon explained why 2024 was Max Verstappen's best season in Formula 1 so far.
What many pundits and F1 fans tend to appreciate about Max Verstappen's 2024 title is that he didn't have the dominant car that he had a year before.
Although Red Bull started the season really strong, they lost their advantage and fell behind their rivals after the Miami Grand Prix.
Red Bull's team principal, Christian Horner, recently confirmed that his team did not have the fastest car for about 70% of the season. Yet Verstappen still managed to win the title, and he did it with a 63-point lead over second-place Lando Norris.
Alex Albon, who knows how it feels to drive the current generation of F1 cars and had the chance to see Verstappen achieve what he did, says it was the four-time world champion's best season.
The Williams Racing F1 driver compared 2024 to 2021, which was the year when the Dutchman secured his first F1 title. He told RacingNews365:
"I think it was his best one. His 2021 year was special, but it was a dogfight."
"Whereas this one...it was nice in a way because I felt you could see the skill Max has, not just in terms of one-lap performance or whatever, but also race craft, weekend management, all those kind of things."
"When you saw the car wasn't quite there, he was still putting away good results, not letting Lando close the gap throughout the year. That, to me, was impressive."
Although there were races where the four-time world champion might have had the fourth-fastest car, he never finished worse than P6. In 24 Grand Prix races, he scored 14 podiums and 9 victories.
"You can see, in some ways, there was experience and a maturity, whereas, in 2021, it was a bit more raw, and you could see that against Lewis, it was a raw dogfight, whereas this was a bit more tactical."
"It felt like he was seeing things from a bigger picture, but still executing and having great quali laps and whatnot, so it was a very strong year. [I was] Really impressed."
"If he'd had no competition, you wouldn't have seen that, so it was nice for him to get that competition so people could actually see what he's capable of."
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