High drama, man!

After last year's rather boring season in which Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton simply dominated all the way through, this has been a truly exciting season to watch. Lewis Hamilton is still looking for his 8th world championship (which would surpass Michael Schumaker's mark of 7), but now Red Bull has taken a big step forward with the Mad Dutchman, Max Verstappen.

The fight between these two has been close all season, with Verstappen holding a lead recently, but with the past few races that lead has evaporated and now the two leading contenders are tied at 369.5 points going into the final race of the season, the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. I had to look it up, but this is only the second time that the leaders have been tied going into the final race, the first being back in 1974. And it's even more impressive since the 2021 season has a record 22 races on the schedule.

Technically, Max has the tie-breaker as he has won 9 races to Lewis' 8. It would be possible for Verstappen to crash into Hamilton, taking them both out of the final race and leaving the tie in points, but Max with the tie-breaker. There is some precedent for this with Senna/Prost, as well as Michael Schumacher. In 1994 it was pretty apparent that Schumacher deliberately took out his rival Damon Hill in the final race when he had a slight lead over him. The same situation came again going into the final race of 1997, but this time Schumacher ended his race, but not his rival's. After the race the FIA disqualified Schumacher from all of his world championship points and basically drew a line in the sand against any such tactics in the future.

What is stopping Max Verstappen from crashing into Lewis Hamilton to win the Formula 1 championship?

I was just curious if there were any others at all geeked up for this race. I have not followed Formula 1 for very long, really just starting after I got my Youtube TV subscription back in 2017 and could automatically record all the races to watch whenever. During that span the world championship has always been decided a few races before the end of the season, and it has always been Sir Lewis Hamilton. If anyone is maybe interested, but reluctant to bother because you're just not familiar with the sport, I recommend catching up on the Netflix series "Drive to Survive", which takes an inside look (and probably a bit dramatized) at Formula 1 the past three seasons. Despite the boring 2020 Formula 1 season, the last series for Drive to Survive was pretty good, even if only for the coverage of Romaine Grojean's fiery crash as well as a look at how the pandemic affected the sport.

Don’t follow it but find a rabbit hole sometimes. Being in Mfg, the pit stops are incredible and the speed the cars go is great. Also watch some super bike races and Isle of Man races. Those guys are wacko.


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Just came across this cool graphic showing how neck-and-neck these two drivers have been all season:

Not only were they tied going into the final race, the race came down to the final lap after being released from behind a safety car.

Congrats to Max Verstappen on his first world championship, and the first work champion not named Lewis Hamilton in five years!