Max Verstappen is looking for win number 11 of the season before the Orange Army at Zandvoort.
With the F1 season set to resume this weekend with the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, the four-week break has given the drivers a chance to relax and reflect on what is ahead with the remaining 10 races.
What is evident is the fact that with 10 victories from 12 races, and a 125-point lead over Red Bull teammate Sergio Perez, world champion Max Verstappen can unofficially be referred to as a three-time champion. Barring serious injury or illness, Verstappen is not going to be caught in the championship race.
There has only been one posthumous world champion, namely Jochen Rindt in 1970, who was born in Germany but brought up in Austria, and won his first grand prix at Watkins Glen, US, in 1969, in the Gold Leaf Lotus.
His first F1 race was actually in 1964 at the Austrian GP, and he got a Cooper works drive the following year, becoming teammates with New Zealander Bruce McLaren. They became close friends. Rindt was third in the championship in 1966 despite three race retirements, and in the next two seasons, he only finished four grand prix.
1968 was not a good year for Rindt. The season started well with third place behind the Lotuses of Jim Clark and Graham Hill, but tragedy struck at Hockenheim when Clark was killed in an F2 race.
“If Jim Clark is not safe, what can happen to us?” Rindt remarked at the time.
It was the first of a number of references he would make about death. After racing unsuccessfully in the Indy 500 in 1967, he remarked: “In Indianapolis, I always feel like I am on my way to my own funeral.”
After joining Lotus, he once spookily said: “At Lotus, I can either be world champion, or die.”
Although he came of age as a Lotus driver, he was never really happy with the car. After being injured in a practice crash in the French GP, when a rear wing broke, Rindt turned on the car’s designer and team owner Colin Chapman.
“If this happens again and I survive, I will kill all of you,” he reportedly yelled at Chapman.
The 1970 season began poorly for Rindt, with DNFs in the first two races. His victory at Monaco was followed by another DNF. This was part of the era known as ‘The Deadly Years’. On June 2, McLaren was killed at Goodwood, testing his CanAm car. Three weeks later, Rindt won the Dutch GP at Zandvoort from Jackie Stewart, but did so with a heavy heart, because during the race, their close friend Piers Courage lost his life in a fiery crash. He had dined with Courage the night before the race and had lost two close friends in a very short time, causing him to consider if he wanted to continue in the sport.
“Maybe I will not live to reach the age of 40,” the 28-year-old Rindt said at the time.
“But until that time, I will have experienced more things in life than anybody else.
“I plan to go on racing as long as I enjoy it, but I don’t want to feel dependent on it. Too many drivers go on racing too long just for the money. And they usually end up getting killed. I want to be able to pull out when I’ve had enough.”
After Zandvoort, Rindt won the next three races in France, England and Germany, and had a healthy lead in the driver’s championship over Jackie Ickx going to the Italian GP at Monza on September 5.
Tragically, during practice his car went straight ahead at the Parabolica and crashed into barriers later found to have been inadequately installed. He was thrown from the car, and suffered a fatal neck injury when during the impact his body slid under a loose crotch seat belt, which he reportedly refused to tighten so he could exit the car quickly if it caught on fire.
At his funeral in Graz, fellow F1 driver Joakim Bonnier, gave the eulogy:
“To die doing something you loved, is to die happy. And Jochen has the admiration and the respect of all of us. The only way you can admire and respect a great driver and friend. Regardless of what happens in the remaining Grands Prix this year, to all of us, Jochen is the world champion.”
Bonnier’s eulogy was similar to a sentiment expressed by McLaren in a eulogy for his 26-year-old Cooper teammate Timmy Mayer, who was killed in practice in the last race of the 1964 Tasman series in Tasmania.
“The news that he had died instantly was a terrible shock to all of us, but who is to say that he had not seen more, done more and learned more in his few years than many people do in a lifetime? To do something well is so worthwhile that to die trying to do it better cannot be foolhardy. It would be a waste of life to do nothing with one’s ability, for I feel that life is measured in achievement, not in years alone.”
In his book titled From the Cockpit the late motorsport author Eoin Young said that when McLaren gave that eulogy at Mayer’s funeral, he had “virtually penned his own epitaph”.
As if to underline the rate of mortality amongst racing drivers in the 60s and 70s, Bonnier, who was the first Swede to win a grand prix, would be killed instantly two years later during the 1972 Le Mans 24-hour race, after his car somersaulted into the trees following a collision with another car.
Despite winning two of the remaining three grand prix in 1970, Ickx was unable to outscore Rindt, who won the championship posthumously by 5 points. Stewart presented Rindt’s widow, Nina, with the championship trophy at a ceremony in Paris in November that year.
In the book by David Treymayne on Rindt, titled Jochen Rindt Uncrowned King, the forward was written by Sir Jackie Stewart, and included this excerpt.
“His exuberant driving was truly remarkable, his car control superb but it wasn’t always the fastest way,” Stewart wrote. “By 1969 Jochen had worked that out. Jim Clark had died the year before, which was a great loss for both Jochen and I. Jochen, in my mind, came of age; he moved on from that exuberance in driving, to be a much more calculated and more efficient racing driving.”
That comment by Stewart could easily sum up the way Verstappen has evolved as a driver. When he started in F1 in 2015, he was 17 years old and came straight to F1 from F3. If he crashed, he would often blame everyone else, and had the nickname, “Crashtappen”.
Verstappen has hinted a number of times that he may not stay in F1 as long as some people might think he would, given his success, especially in the last two years. He has been critical of the direction F1 is headed, especially with 24 races on the calendar for 2024, which Verstappen thinks is too much. When quizzed about his criticism, he explained why.
“Yes, because I care about the sport that I always really liked. And I still like it, but to a certain extent,” he said.
“It is also not that I am completely against changes, as is sometimes claimed. But they have to be changes that benefit Formula 1. Why do you need to change certain things if things are running well? I think a traditional qualifying session is set up just fine in that form. It shouldn’t be about the money.”
“People might think ‘he makes a lot of money, what is this guy whining about?’ But it’s about wellbeing, how you experience things and not how much you earn,” he said, echoing Rindt’s similar thought back in 1970.
Verstappen has quite a lot of similarities to Rindt, as both came into F1 with a lot of confidence in their own ability and not afraid to mix it with world champions on the grid.
In the memorable championship battle with Lewis Hamilton in 2021, they collided at Silverstone and Monza. Hamilton got a penalty for punting Verstappen off at Copse corner, while Verstappen was found responsible for ‘parking’ his Red Bull on top of Hamilton’s Mercedes at the first chicane at Monza.
Since then, Verstappen has largely been incident free, possibly because he’s usually out front and out of trouble.
But the maturity in his driving is similar to what Stewart was talking about with Rindt, who toned down his exuberant style of driving to become a calculating, efficient driver, yet still fast. Verstappen has won the two grand prix held at Zandvoort since the return of the circuit in 2021. Prior to that, Niki Lauda’s 1985 victory, his third at the circuit, was the last time it had been used. Other victors included Bonnier in 1959, Clark five times, and Stewart three times.
There will be some Orange Army fans supporting Verstappen, who were at Zandvoort in 1970 when Rindt won on the day one of his best friends was killed. That, thanks to F1′s extraordinary safety measures, which Stewart pioneered in the 70s, is unlikely to happen again. But the uncrowned king of F1, as David Tremayne called him in his excellent book, will always be remembered as someone special.
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