When The Children Cry

It’s hard not to look at Max Verstappen as a cyborg terminator sent from the future to obliterate every F1 record that ever lived. He’s been karting since he could walk. He entered Formula One at a time most kids are getting their first driver’s license. When he gets a huge win, he barely cracks a smile.

That’s why I kind of enjoyed yesterday’s Hungarian grand prix. While I still believe Verstappen is other-worldly, for a few minutes Max proved he was human. In case you missed it, he drove a couple stints in an online sim race. The first stretch kept him up until 2 a.m. and then he got up later on Sunday to drive his fake car again just a few hours just before he was slated to drive his real Red Bull against the other seventeen best drivers in the world plus Logan Sargeant and Lance Stroll in Hungary.

While I don’t understand what it’s like to drive a F1 car or even do good at sim-racing (you should see how many times I hit the wall on a single lap at Monaco on Xbox), I do recognize what it’s like to threaten everyone in your path when you haven’t gotten enough sleep. And that’s what I saw in Max yesterday, whose every radio message seemed to attack the Red Bull team for their strategic idiocy with a South Park episode worth of expletives.

Before anyone could get poor Max a power nap, he drove straight in to the side of Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes. Just before that Hamilton was doing his own whingeing on the radio about his tire grip. Yet, somehow Lewis still found a way to capture his record-extending 200^th podium (Schumacher is next at 155).

Given the number of races held each year now and that Max has 107 podiums in the bag, he would still need to win every single race for almost four and a half years to tie Lewis. 

A year ago, that Max could eventually break this podium record would have seemed academic. But with Oscar Piastri winning in Hungary, making this the seventh driver to win this year, we now know Max is no longer a sure thing. He gets cranky. But, then again while the crash with Hamilton would have put most racers out, Verstappen somehow still brought it home to fifth place.

So let’s not get too tied up in Verstappen’s humanity just yet. This could all be a blip. Given that Merc is trending upward and that Max, assuming he doesn’t retire early to do all the things he claims he can do in the world outside F1 like he’s always threatening, is likely to join the Silver Arrows in 2026. This will happen if for no other reason that his boss Christian Horner’s hubris will have destroyed the team. Or, more likely, it will happen because Verstappen will have to enter witness protection because his race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase will have grown so tired of the public radio lashings, he’ll put out a retributive hit on Max.

Max’s crash did open the door to Lando Norris finally catching some points to maybe make the driver’s championship a competition by the end of the season. A couple DNFs for Max and a few top finishes by McLaren, and it might be game on.

If it is game on at Abu Dhabi and Norris somehow loses the world championship by the seven points that he would have had if he’d ignored the parental pleading over the radio of every single McLaren team leader and took it home to first in Hungary, there will be blood.

But should there be? Did Lando act like a child over the radio too when he refused to give up his position to Piastri or remained silent as the team tried to trick him in to slowing down by telling him to save his tires at what seemed like every corner on the track?