Horror movie character? 'I don't waste my time on that' - Verstappen in-depth on title race

By Sunday evening, Max Verstappen could be a five-time world champion, and a driver who this season has achieved one of the all-time great recoveries in sport.

But sitting at Abu Dhabi's Yas Marina circuit on Thursday, as the sun sets over the harbour around which he and McLaren drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri will settle this year's championship, he is calmness personified.

Over a 20-minute interview with BBC Sport, Verstappen covers the full breadth of his extraordinary season, and all aspects of the contest that awaits this weekend.

He acknowledges that he is probably in his rivals' heads, discusses his intense competitiveness, admits it went too far earlier this year, and explains why.

He ponders Red Bull's recovery this year, their change of team principal mid-season, and the fact he considered a move elsewhere over the summer.

He's matter-of-fact, down-to-earth, good-humoured, and straight to the point. And he sums himself up with one simple sentence.

"I'm too... driven," Verstappen says. "Because I never settle for not good enough."

There has been nothing not good enough about Verstappen of late. Eight races ago, he was 104 points off the championship lead and 70 behind Norris.

Now, Verstappen is 12 points behind the Briton, and four ahead of Piastri, as they head into the first three-way Formula 1 title showdown in a season finale for 15 years.

"It's still not in my control, but at least there is a fight," he says of his mentality going into the weekend.

Winning the title would be "nice", he acknowledges, but if he does not achieve that, he says: "I'm not going to be crying in a corner.

"It doesn't matter if we finish first, second, or third. I know that I had a really good season, and that's fine. I know that in general we have not been the quickest team.

"Already being in this fight is a bonus. Even if then we don't win it, it's not going to be stinging. Because I know where we lost it and I know that in general we have not been the quickest team."

Verstappen's biggest deficit this year was after Piastri won the Dutch Grand Prix, a point when even Norris looked down and out.

At the very next race, the Italian Grand Prix at the beginning of September, Red Bull found new performance, but even so Verstappen is in the mix only because McLaren have begun to stumble, their drivers have tripped over themselves and made mistakes, and the team the same.

I ask him what he thinks has been the key factor, whether it's McLaren having two drivers competing with each other, the fact that they have made mistakes, that Norris and Piastri have not performed as well as him, or Red Bull's own recovery.

"All of it," Verstappen says.

The past eight races have been Verstappen in extremis. He has taken five wins, a second place and two thirds.

Zak Brown, the chief executive officer of McLaren Racing, has called him "relentless" and likened him to a horror movie character who keeps coming back to life to terrify his victims.

Does he realise that sounds like a tacit admission that he is in his rivals' heads, they're effectively scared of him?

"Yeah," he says, "but I don't pay a lot of attention to it. I don't waste my energy on that. I do my stuff here. I know that when I'm with the team, when I jump in the car, I drive it as fast as I can.

"I just do my thing. I just don't really get excited about that kind of fact. I'm quite flat, I guess, in emotions in that sense."

Verstappen has earned this imposing position. He's perceived throughout F1 as a kind of irresistible force with good reason, simply through the sheer weight of number of races where he has looked that way.

"I know that I will never give up," he says. "I know that I always try and extract the most out of it.

"Can I be beaten on the day? For sure. I mean, everyone can be beaten on the day, but can you beat me 24 races in a year? No. That's something that if you want to fight for a championship, that is something that you have to keep up, and that's the hardest bit."

He credits his father, Jos, who famously schooled him to be a future F1 driver from the age of three, for inspiring this level of consistency, saying: "It's probably been drilled in me from when I was a kid."

But the level he is currently at "comes a bit with experience".

Verstappen adds: "My mentality has always been the same. That's why earlier on in my career, sometimes I also got a bit frustrated because I knew what to do, it was just not possible. Or I couldn't really show it because of a lot of factors, but I knew that it was always there.

"But of course, up until 2021, I never had a car that could fight also for the championship, so then it's impossible to really show that."

His experience of being in this position, he says, will "probably help me a bit to stay calm".

For Norris and Piastri, he says, "of course, it's a bit nerve-wracking, which is normal when you fight for your first title. But at the same time, they still have a very quick car, which they can rely on."

Back in the summer, there was no indication Verstappen would end up here. Red Bull seemed unable to get out of a competitive slump that dated back a year, and Verstappen was talking to Mercedes about a possible move.

In the middle of all that, team principal Christian Horner was sacked, and replaced by Laurent Mekies.

Verstappen says: "The first thing that I want to say is that I always had a great relationship with Christian. And still to this day, a lot of people, we appreciate what he has done for the team.

"When I joined, Christian was already there for a much longer time. The win that we had here in 2021, the emotions, and that night as well, that's stuff people will never take away from us.

"The team was in a tough time already in '24 a bit. And it didn't really seem to improve. And at one point, the shareholders wanted a different direction.

"When you look back at it, of course, it's a big shock. But at the same time, when you look at other sports, when sometimes a team has been functioning for a very long time, very well, and then at one point it's not, and there's not really also a clear direction out of it, sometimes management makes a big change."

Of Mekies, Verstappen says: "Very different personality. I get along very well with Laurent as well. He's a bit more technically involved in the team. And you can see that probably in other teams as well that that has been a bit the trend. People are changing into a bit more of a technical role as a team boss."

Was that key to the improvement in the car's performance?

"Key? I think... definitely an addition to. Maybe more questions were asked on the technical side of things."

It was only a couple of weeks after Horner's departure that Verstappen finally committed to staying at Red Bull next season, after talks with Mercedes.

How seriously did he think about a move?

"For me, it's not only about F1," he says. "There's a lot of things that have to come together for me to make a change. Future roles, stuff like that. So if I ever would make a change, of course, it's a big one for me because this definitely feels like a second family, and that's not easy to replicate, let's say, like that.

"The change, if I would ever make one, it's not only because I need a faster F1 car or I need a difference in the environment. There's a lot of things that are around my F1 career and things that I'm doing outside of F1 that all have to come together."

So it wasn't really something you were seriously considering?

"I'm not going to lie. For sure, there were talks. But at the same time, it was all very friendly and open. Nothing more than that."

Regardless of Red Bull's recovery, and McLaren's fallibility, Verstappen says he is "quite surprised" to be going into the last race still in with a chance of the title.

"Normally, when you're that far down - and of course also up until that point, it was just going up, up, up, right? So, there's no real clue to it at the time that we could turn it around or at least close that gap drastically.

"But we did, and that's something that we're very proud of. And I'm happy to be in that fight until the end. It also keeps it exciting, I guess, for everyone that it is not only between the two drivers of one team. That's always better when there is another team involved."

If he wins it, he says, it will not be his most satisfying season. For that, he picks 2023, when he won a record 19 of 22 races.

"This has been a really good season, probably my best season, but it has also been frustrating at times because we were not quick enough."

Even so, he recognises what he has achieved.

"You always try to improve as a driver, you try to be more all-round," he says. "I've dragged some results out of it that probably weren't realistic or possible in some weekends, so yeah, I've been happy."

He does this, he says, "by always trying to look for details, trying to just learn about the car, learn about yourself, do a lot of things also outside of F1.

"I'm driving, of course, a lot of different cars,, external which I don't think it hurts you, racing in F1. So, yeah, just trying to make yourself a bit more of a complete driver, a bit more all-round."

The one blot on his copybook this season was the Spanish Grand Prix, when he lost his temper after his team fitted what in hindsight were the wrong type of tyres under a late safety car.

He found himself under attack, ended up deliberately hitting George Russell's Mercedes, which earned him a 10-second penalty and dropped him from fifth place to 10th. Those nine points could have come in handy this weekend.

This is the point at which he makes his remark about being "too driven".

"I could have easily said, 'I'm on the hard tyres, my race is gone,' and you just let everyone by," he says. "But that's not how I am.

"Of course, the reaction that came out of it is not good. But at the same time, it's because I always, when I'm in the car, I give it 100%. I cannot sit there and be 95% and that just explains it.

"Of course, when you look back at it, it was not ideal. But it's also moments that you learn from."

It was a sense of injustice or unfairness, he admits, that triggered it.

"I'm not the only one that has these things that you learn from in a year," he says. "Or you think 'I could have done better.' (If) that's my only imperfection in the season. I happily take it."

So how far will he push it in an attempt to win the title? I mention 2016, when Lewis Hamilton tried to back Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg into his rivals, to no avail.

"It's quite tough, probably, to do something like that," he says. "We just want to do our best race and the other things are not really in our control."

I ask whether he considers gamesmanship or even dirty tactics, such as employed by Michael Schumacher at times.

"I think that's quite extreme," he says. "It's not something that I'm thinking about."

And if it turns out that he cannot win it, which of his rivals would he prefer to see as champion?

"Oh, I really don't care," he says. "That's not really in my interest anyway. I hope, of course, that it will just be a great race weekend and hopefully a memorable race."

Abu Dhabi Grand Prix

5-7 December

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