Verstappen will win the 2023 world championship and drag his team along to the constructors title with him. This much is fact as Formula 1 begins reanimating itself from its midseason slumber with 10 races still to run.
Verstappen’s title advantage is a whopping 125 points on his own teammate, Sergio Pérez. The Dutchman could retire from half of the remaining grands prix and still lead the standings on countback.
The next-best driver not in a Red Bull Racing car is Fernando Alonso, who is fully 165 points adrift. With the beleaguered Pérez having rediscovered some semblance of form before the break, even second place seems out of reach for the veteran Spaniard in his upstart Aston Martin.
Red Bull Racing, meanwhile, has more than double the points of second-placed Mercedes, the scores standing at 503-247. Verstappen’s points alone will likely see his team claim the constructors crown.
So what are we doing here, with so long still to go and so little still on the line?
The answer comes in the form of another question: how far can Red Bull Racing go?
This is unchartered territory for F1. Many teams have put entire seasons into submission just as rapidly, but none has done so flawlessly.
Red Bull Racing is the first team to win 12 races in a row in a single season, and no team has ever won every race in one campaign.
McLaren came closest in 1988, when the MP4/4 piloted by iconic pairing Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost won every race but one: the Italian Grand Prix. Prost was put out of contention early with engine problems. Senna crashed out trying to lap a backmarker with two laps to go.
Ferrari cruised to a one-two finish on home soil and in the first race in Italy since the death of Enzo Ferrari.
That year was the previous benchmark for dominance, with McLaren having set the record at 11 consecutive races wins thought unreachable before this season.
The RB19 has had precious few reliability problems, and Verstappen has shown none of the impetuousness that coloured his precocious early years in the sport that might see him lose a lead by his own hand. Their combination has proved formidable. More recently it’s looked unbreakable.
But still that 22-race figure looms large. And with every passing race, with every weekend we draw closer to the Abu Dhabi finale, the pressure will build and build.
As the unprecedented achievement looms into view, the season will turn from a championship into a knockout tournament with a hundred ways to lose but only one way to win.
Early in the year a mistake, a lost pole, the loss of the lead, could be written off so long as the points tally was unharmed.
A clumsy error now would mean this perhaps once-in-a-generation chance to rewrite the history books would be lost.
That’s the sort of pressure the team will find itself under if its winning streak remains intact once both titles are formally sewn up.
And while domination of the kind F1 has become used to doesn’t itself thrill, the pressure to achieve perfection is intrinsically interesting.
Similar to the era of the big four in tennis not so many years ago, the hegemony of Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray didn’t deter crowds; it drew them in to witness greatness, knowing too that only a truly exceptional performance could fell an all-time great.
The same is now true for Red Bull Racing. Short of a calamitous serious of external events - and even perhaps despite them - only perfect execution from a rival team-driver combination at a select few circuits could possibly be enough to overcome the Verstappen-RBR juggernaut.
Can Red Bull Racing reach the unreachable? The first step comes at this weekend’s Dutch Grand Prix.