In the wake of the 2024 U.S. and Mexican Grands Prix, where Max Verstappen made a handful of cynical defensive and attacking moves against title rival Lando Norris, I’ve seen surprising support for the idea that Verstappen is not a good wheel-to-wheel racer — and apparently never has been.

Some of his moves are unquestionably unsporting, but to say this is a consequence of his inability to do otherwise is clearly untrue. Like other “dirty” drivers before him, Verstappen drives on and over the limit of the rules when it’s to his benefit, not because that’s the only tool in his toolbox.

Heading to Mexico, Verstappen was ahead of Norris by 57 points in the 2024 Formula 1 Drivers Championship, with five full races to go and two sprint races. In most seasons, this would be an insurmountable gap to close — but in 2024, there’s more than a mere outside chance of Norris overtaking Verstappen. The former’s McLaren is the fastest car on the grid, while the latter’s Red Bull has been third at best. If Norris finishes 1st with Verstappen 4th in every remaining race, Norris would win the title.

So Verstappen is now in a situation similar to the final rounds of the dramatic 2021 F1 season: driving a slower car than his rival, and desperate to minimize the hemorrhaging of points. This is when his driving pushes the limits of sportsmanship — when there’s a tactical advantage to it. When Verstappen has a car capable of fighting for wins without an overwhelming disadvantage, his wheel-to-wheel driving tends to be impeccable. It’s when, in the pursuit of a championship, he has no recourse other than desperate maneuvers that we see him make moves like in Brazil 2021 or Mexico 2024.

And critically, the moves hit their mark. At the Circuit of the Americas, Verstappen actually extended his championship lead over Norris. And in Mexico City, even after receiving a 20-second penalty for his unsporting move, he still managed to stem the bleeding of points.

Had he not held up Norris in that manner, there’s a good chance his rival would have won the race, resulting in a gap of 44 points. As it happened, Norris finished 2nd with Verstappen 6th — fewer points for Verstappen due to the penalty, but the gap is 47 points. It could have easily been as high 50 points had Charles Leclerc not been unlucky with backmarkers, which helped Norris to catch and pass him in the closing laps of the race.

So regardless of how ugly it was, it did make a positive contribution to Max Verstappen’s title fight. It’s ruthless, but it’s also precisely that ruthlessness that is, in the eyes of many, a key ingredient to winning world championships.

Indeed, when Norris races meekly, many F1 fans complain he doesn’t have the fight necessary to be a world champion. But when Verstappen races fiercely, they complain he goes too far. Verstappen merely does what he needs to win, and that’s not just a common goal among F1 drivers — it’s also their job. Millions of dollars and thousands of team personnel depend on their success. If viewers don’t want to see that kind of racing, then it’s the role of the stewards and the racing regulations to discourage it. It’s not the role of the drivers to leave points on the table for the sake of being nice to their competitors.

When a professional soccer player commits a tactical foul in the 90th minute to prevent an opposing player from scoring and eliminating their nation from the World Cup, spectators say: “Easy red, but fair enough.” Everyone agrees it isn’t sporting, and the player may even be called dirty — but fans also understands he did what was needed for the greater good of the team.

Verstappen is rarely afforded the same grace. Formula 1 fans call him dirty but seemingly without understanding the tactical side of it — or that part of the reason he’s paid $55 million a year is that he’s very good at it.

Formula 1 drivers are great athletes and deserve plenty of credit for their abilities. But one of those abilities is not fast reaction times, and it bothers me to no end that people continually act as though F1 drivers have supernatural reflexes. They have regular human reaction times like the rest of us, and the fact that people think otherwise says a lot about their misunderstanding of expertise in general.

The average person has a reaction time of 200-300 milliseconds. The Human Benchmark website says the average score on its reaction time test is 273 ms, though it likely skews high due to interface latency (with a high refresh rate monitor, I scored an average of 171 ms).

F1 drivers are in the same ballpark. The race broadcast often shows the time it takes for drivers to react to the starting lights, and the top starters are usually in the 200-250 ms range. Yet a lot of fuss is made about their reaction times, as though they’re part of what it takes to drive a twitchy, 200-mph racing car. And not only is that wrong, it undermines the actual skill that F1 drivers do have.

The true skill is anticipation, and accurate anticipation comes with expertise. All professional athletes seem to have incredible reflexes when applied to their discipline. That is the product of being expertly aware of many possible scenarios, and of being trained to act appropriately in these scenarios. This enables experts to be prepared to act when something does occur. To the untrained eye, that preparedness can very easily look like natural reflexes.

When a car unexpectedly comes across an F1 driver, and that driver seems to react with supernatural speed to evade the accident, a casual viewer may be stunned at the quick reaction. Yet that is only because the viewer is operating with far less information than the driver. The driver would have been far more likely to see the incident coming, due to his superior ability to read his surroundings and predict other drivers’ movements. In other words, he sees things that the casual viewer does not.

Casual viewers, blind to what they does not see, too often make the mistake of assuming they are operating on the same level of awareness as the driver. Thus they conclude that the driver’s superior ability to react to a situation comes from his superior reaction times, rather than his superior awareness of said situation. But in situations where just a few milliseconds can make a difference, if you are at the point of purely reacting, it probably means you weren’t paying enough attention to begin with, and you are already too late.

You can apply this to your own driving on regular public roads. If you are attentive to your surroundings and paying attention to other drivers, and if you have a good sense of how your vehicle behaves, how to control it, and how other vehicles can behave, then you will be much better at anticipating potential trouble; consequently, you will be a lot more adept at handling that trouble.

If your awareness helps you avoid an incident on the road with passengers on board, they might then commend you on your good reflexes, rather than the effort you put into being a good driver. This is because people have an inaccurate tendency to attribute skill to natural talent rather than to work and discipline. As mentioned above, this is because they can only see the situation from their own point of view — from the point of view of a layman, not from that of an expert who has put in the work. Therefore, in their shoes, to do what the expert seems to have done, it would have taken exceptional reflexes. But to do what the expert has actually done, it would take an entirely different brain.

The Monaco Grand Prix is absurd. Every year, Formula 1 heads to this tiny principality near the south of France to race around a circuit it has long outgrown. There’s excitement in the air, even though the cars are too big and too fast for the narrow street track, and everybody knows it. It’s often called “the jewel in the crown” of motorsports, hailed as one of the most prestigious sporting events in the world. And even though the race is a snooze every single time, it somehow manages to retain its elevated status, like it has cast a spell on the whole of the F1 community and even beyond.

Nelson Piquet Jr, three-time champion, likened racing at Monaco to riding a bike inside your living room. This was in the ’80s, and the bikes have only gotten bigger since. At the 2024 Monaco Grand Prix that took place just last Sunday, there were only four on-track overtakes over the course of the 78-lap race, and none of them for points-scoring positions. It was like watching a soccer game where the goal had been substantially reduced in size, so the teams didn’t even bother getting the ball into the penalty area because they knew they’d never get it past the keeper.

The only positive outcome was that the likable Charles Leclerc finally took victory at his home race (it having unluckily eluded him twice before) and that Ferrari looked strong enough that it might give Red Bull Racing something to think about in the championship. But aside these silver linings, Monaco was a dull as can be.

And yet, before long, F1 will be looking forward to racing there again. That is how it always goes.

Like a fever dream

Every year, F1 arrives at Monaco with enthusiasm and leaves with disappointment. First, it simply beholds this sparkling city of billionaires, pinched between the foothills of the Alps and a surreally blue sea, as if in a sort of trance. Monaco is the type of city ruled by a man who goes by “His Serene Highness,” whose personal car collection is a museum, and who made a princess of an Olympic swimmer. Yachts glitter in the sun, moored by the racetrack, where mingle more A-listers than an ensemble summer blockbuster. Supermodels lounge on rooftops for the helicopter cameras. It’s all so glamorous, the refrain goes. Just thinking of it, you can practically hear the clink of champagne flutes.

Then, after a few practice sessions, it begins: Qualifying. Broadcasters remind viewers that this is the true spectacle of the weekend, where drivers wrangle absurdly powerful cars on this too-narrow track, putting their wheels millimeter-close to the walls and often depositing some rubber on them. They do everything to set the fastest lap they can, which will determine the starting order for the race the next day. That’s the case for every grand prix weekend, but there’s a special, desperate quality to it on this day, as though all the drivers are trying just a little harder than normal. Of course, they are. It’s precisely because the Sunday race is guaranteed to be a procession that they put it all on the line in qualifying. It’s absurd, yet it only serves to enhance the strangely attractive uniqueness of F1 at Monaco.

And finally, the race. The lack of action is inevitable, yet everybody watches anyway, clinging on to the hope that maybe, just maybe, this time will be different. A lunge down the inside. A scrap in the tunnel. The sheer improbability of these things only heightens the anticipation that they just might happen, and that if they do, it will be truly epic. It’s hard to imagine where a pass could even take place, but surely, one of the world’s best drivers can think of something … right? Live commentators continually suggest a heroic move is, if not imminent, then at least possible — and later, post-race interviews encourage drivers to describe the excitement and challenge of the race, as though to assure viewers that what they’d just seen had, in fact, been absolutely thrilling.

In the following days, as though waking up from a fever dream, drivers and pundits and everybody in between will admit the racing hadn’t been good, and begin to speak of the need for change. They’ll say the cars should be smaller, the tires should degrade faster, that it simply can’t go on like this. Some may even dare ask: Should Monaco be on the calendar at all?

Then the year goes on and the race fades into memory. As if by magic, viewers return for the next season having seemingly forgotten about the previous one and all the sleep-inducing Monaco races that had come before — utterly ready and eager to go through the motions, all over again.