DOWN TO THE WIRE
FORGET FOR A MOMENT, if you can, the way the outcome of the Abu Dhabi finale – and therefore of the whole championship – was decided. Let’s just focus on the incredible season up to that point which brought Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton to that decisive weekend on an identical points score.
It was a story with so many points of significance: the king of the pride finally facing the full ferocious onslaught of the young pretender. The full-on intensity of Verstappen’s attacking style, his fearless no-compromise wheel-to-wheel style versus the measured, wary, multidimensional approach of Hamilton, who still had the sting of stunning pace within him when required. Their year-long duel made it the season of yield/no yield, of building tensions and the inevitable flashpoints from conflicting codes of on-track conduct, of a whole new fan following and how it clashed with the traditional. In the age of Netflix the circus kept rolling along, gathering new followers, doing much-needed great business after the commercial disaster imposed on it by the first year of Covid. All this while continuing to transition itself from an exclusive celebration of conspicuous consumption to something more everyman and carnival, something which could stake a claim to a future in a new, more environmentally and socially aware age.
The traditionalists might
