OVERVIEW
The numbers for Max Verstappen's 2023 season read less like a championship campaign than a clerical error. An average finishing position of 1.3 across twenty-three races. The man finished first so often that second place felt like a bad weekend. In the four seasons of telemetry data PitWall GP holds — 2023 through 2026 — no driver in the field has posted a number half as absurd.
What followed was more interesting. The 2024 regulations didn't slow Verstappen so much as they woke everyone else up. His average finish crept to 3.6, which in any other context would be remarkable but in the shadow of what came before looked almost mortal. By 2025, with the field tighter still, he sat at 3.7 — still on the podium more often than not, still winning races, but now earning them rather than collecting them.
Across seventy-one Grand Prix starts in our dataset, Verstappen has raced for Red Bull Racing every season, worn the number 1, and recorded a top speed of 356 km/h at Mexico City's thin air in 2024. He has set competitive fastest laps at all twenty-four circuits on the calendar. The question the data poses isn't whether he's quick — it's whether anyone can stay quick enough, long enough, to match him when it matters.
SEASON BY SEASON
2023 was the year the sport ran out of superlatives. Twenty-three races, an average finish of 1.3, an average grid position of 3.3 — meaning he regularly started third or fourth and still won. The gap between Verstappen and the field wasn't a gap so much as a geological feature.
2024 brought the correction everyone expected and nobody quite believed. The average finish rose to 3.6, the grid position to 3.5. Red Bull's advantage narrowed. McLaren found pace. Ferrari found consistency. Verstappen still won races — you don't lose the instinct — but now the victories required strategy, timing, and the occasional knife fight through the midfield. The car was no longer doing the winning by itself.
2025 held steady at 3.7 average finish, 3.6 average grid. The numbers suggest a driver who has plateaued, but that reading misses the context: the 2025 regulations produced slower, more equal cars. Verstappen's ability to extract performance from a less dominant package — still finishing on the podium in twenty-four races — is arguably more impressive than the 2023 walkover.
2026 is early — two races in our data — but the pattern continues. Red Bull Racing, car number 1, the same relentless extraction of tenths from whatever machinery he's given.
DRIVING STYLE
The tyre data tells a story about how Verstappen races. Of his 4,526 racing laps across four seasons, 1,931 were on mediums — 43% of his total. Another 1,746 on hards (39%). Just 535 on softs (12%). The man prefers a tyre he can lean on, not one he has to nurse.
This isn't conservatism. It's pragmatism. Verstappen's qualifying positions average 3.4 across his career in our data, meaning he rarely starts on pole. He makes up the difference on race pace, which means longer stints, which means harder compounds. The medium tyre is his instrument of choice because it lets him push without penalty.
His speed trap numbers confirm the picture. The top recorded speed — 356 km/h at Mexico City in 2024, where the altitude thins the air and rewards power over downforce — tells you he'll take every advantage physics offers. But his fastest laps across circuits aren't always the absolute fastest in the field. They're consistently fast, race after race, circuit after circuit. Suzuka dropped from 94.2 seconds in 2023 to 91.0 in 2025. Zandvoort from 73.9 to 72.9. Monaco from 76.6 to 74.2.
The signature isn't outright pace. It's the absence of bad weekends.