The key danger Max Verstappen must avoid as Red Bull’s faltering year mirrors Brawn GP’s 2009 win

McLaren’s current momentum means the climax of the F1 2024 championship will be very similar to the nail-biting 2009 conclusion.

Max Verstappen’s struggles to keep up with Lando Norris in recent races have seen his lead chipped away at – with six Grands Prix and three Sprint races to go, can the Dutch driver keep his cool and bring home a fourth consecutive title?

Red Bull’s diminishment mirrors Brawn GP’s struggles in 2009

It’s been an astonishing turnaround through the season so far, with Red Bull having hit the ground running with the RB20 to pick up right where it had left off with RB19 – in completely dominant fashion.

The change of concept over the winter had led to plenty of questions about whether this was the right path to take, given the success of the RB19 concept, but Red Bull was confident of a higher development ceiling with its new path.

This was vindicated almost immediately, with Red Bull kicking off with an effortless 1-2 in Bahrain and all appeared right in the team’s world over the first quarter of the season.

But the tide turned, massively, through the second quarter of the championship, with Red Bull falling back into the clutches of the pack as McLaren, Mercedes, and Ferrari have all stepped forward – McLaren most of all.

The Woking-based squad has shown up with the, arguably, quickest car at every race through the summer and, in recent races, has started to more effortlessly exploit this pace as Lando Norris has started to unlock the poise and confidence the team needs their lead driver to.

At Zandvoort, Norris remained calm after losing out to Verstappen at Turn 1 and overtook the Dutch driver to crush his opponent. With Oscar Piastri capitalising on Norris being out of contention in Azerbaijan to win, Norris bounced back in fine form in Singapore to put in his most comprehensive display so far to see off Verstappen yet again.

It recently led Lando Norris to admit that, rather than playing the underdog, McLaren now has the best car on the F1 grid, something that “on average” he believes his team has had for most of the season.

It has set up the chessboard very nicely for an exciting climax as the team that started the year on top no longer appears to have an answer for the pace of its main pursuer and, as a result, now has to try clinging desperately on to make it across the line as World Champions.

In 2009, a very similar situation played out on track with Red Bull also involved – albeit on the other side of the coin as the Milton Keynes-based squad attacked Brawn GP, now Mercedes, for the title.

Far less accustomed to victories in what proved to be Red Bull’s first title challenge, Sebastian Vettel was the Lando Norris equivalent in 2009 as the German driver set about trying to wrestle away the title from Jenson Button.

Brawn GP’s infamous origin story over the winter of 2008 had given way to a fairytale start to the year as Button claimed six wins from the first seven races. With teammate Rubens Barrichello settling into second place in the championship, Button’s lead over Vettel was 32 points.

Striking parallels between 2009 and 2024 F1 championships

Converting the old points system used in 2009 to today’s, Button was on 167 points at the stage where Brawn’s dominance seemed to come to a halt after the Turkish Grand Prix, with Vettel on 70 points. At the same point this year, the Imola Grand Prix, Verstappen had scored 161 points, with Norris on 101 points – meaning the British driver started from a closer point than Vettel was, and with more races on the calendar.

Of course, while Button didn’t win another race that season, Verstappen already has scored a further two, but the momentum is now firmly with Norris and McLaren after eight consecutive races in which Verstappen has been unable to add to his win tally.

Indeed, in the last 10 races of 2009, Button was only on the podium twice while Vettel scored three wins and two podiums alongside two very costly retirements.

Like 2024, there were two interloping teams that joined in the fight for wins, with Ferrari and McLaren (with Lewis Hamilton!) getting in the mix to add to the points swings that Button and Vettel encountered during their title fight – something that Norris and Verstappen have experienced this year as the pendulum has swung away from Red Bull and toward McLaren.

It’s a strikingly similar dynamic to 2009, with the same four teams involved as Brawn GP metamorphosed into Mercedes, with many of the senior engineers working with Button remaining with Brackley to this day.

There are a couple of key differences, namely that a budget cap was not in place and this meant development was continuous throughout the year without any concerns about needing to stay within a cap – provided the team had the budget to do it, an area Red Bull had the upper hand over Brawn as Ross Brawn’s eponymous team had had to shed almost 300 personnel in order to meet its newly restricted status without any significant sponsorship.

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While 2024 is the third year of the current regulations, 2009 was the first of a huge aerodynamic regulation change and was one Brawn nailed down with its initial design and inclusion of the controversial double diffuser.

But the BGP001 ebbed away through the year as Red Bull honed its RB5 into the fastest car on the grid, and just a few short races after Brawn GP had dominated the Turkish Grand Prix, Button hobbled home in seventh place having been miles from the pace.

“We have to unravel what we have done to the car in the last couple of races and understand if we’ve done something that has exacerbated the problem,” is a quote that could have been made by Verstappen or Christian Horner last weekend at Zandvoort, but was actually made by Brawn after that troubled race.

“It seems to have changed from where we were three or four races ago. At Monaco and Turkey, we didn’t have a tyre problem.”

The issue for Brawn turned out to be related to how its car used the tyres, with Button unable to generate sufficient tyre temperature – in Hungary, his tyres were consistently some 20 degrees below optimal temperature, and, as a result, he struggled for pace.

This issue reared its head regularly through the year, with Button then having to worry about the performances of Rubens Barrichello in the sister car as the Brazilian fared better in this regard – an internal pressure that Verstappen does not have to deal with this year.

Can Max Verstappen do what Jenson Button did to win the F1 2024 championship?

Brawn didn’t go completely without victories for the rest of the 2009 season, with Barrichello scoring two wins to help stave off the onslaught of Red Bull and it could be that sneaking in an extra win or two over the remaining six Grands Prix might make all the difference for Verstappen to get across the line as Champion this year.

Should the dominance of McLaren continue for the rest of the season, with Norris completing a clean sweep with the fastest lap and Verstappen managing to salvage second, Verstappen would finish four points clear of Norris – without taking any Sprints into account.

If Red Bull genuinely has no answer to McLaren, things could get quite uncomfortable for Verstappen quite quickly.

After all, with three Sprint races also to come, and the likelihood of Oscar Piastri as well as the two Mercedes and Ferraris also getting in the mix – all while Sergio Perez’s pace in the second Red Bull remains sporadic – the odds appear to be stacking up against Verstappen.

What Verstappen thus needs to do is play the numbers game, like Button did, and concentrate on banking what he can, when he can, without any of the attempted heroics that he tried in Hungary – the peak of his frustration – to his own cost.

2009 showed it is possible for a team no longer capable of wins to be able to massage home a championship, provided its rival lacks the little bit of experience and coolness of head that Vettel still displayed that year.

Appearing on the Sky F1 podcast, Jenson Button has shed some light on the difficult mental challenge that Verstappen is facing – the feeling of powerlessness as the possibility of the title comes down to damage limitation rather than chasing wins.

“I’ve been on the Max side of it, where the car isn’t performing as it was earlier in the season. You’re having someone chase you down, and it’s tough,” Button said.

“You know, Max is a tough cookie. He really is, in terms of I don’t think the pressures really get to him like most drivers, but this is a tricky situation.

“He’s already got into his head, from what I hear, that he’s not going to win another race this year.

“So it’s basically he’s in a position where he’s just going to come home and bring points. But, sometimes, when you’ve put that pressure on yourself, it’s even harder to get a podium.”

The big danger, Button said, is in if Verstappen starts to seize up under the pressure and drive in a fashion that’s unnatural to him – something which Button has previously admitted affected his own title tilt.

Verstappen has usually been the attacking force in his own championship battles, meaning the dynamic of being the prey is a new one, and Button said the Dutch driver’s ability to handle this will be the deciding factor of the final six races.

“It’s definitely not Max’s style to be cautious. But the issue comes if the car isn’t competitive enough in qualifying, then you’ve put yourself in a position where it’s tricky,” he said.

“For example, Austin at Turn 1 is where you could have seven or eight cars wide on turning, and it all narrows down to two cars wide.

“If he’s in a position where the car isn’t quick enough to put it top two, top three, then you’re in the danger zone of getting damaged at Turn 1.

“So that’s when we’ll see a real turnaround, I think, in the championship.

“As soon as you’re a little bit more cautious, that’s when problems start, because no one else is being cautious, and you got one car being cautious and all the others around you not – so it really is a minefield.

“This sport is such a mental game, and it’s hurt me in the past and hurt my performance in the past by not having my head in the right place, and especially when I fought for the championship.

“It’s kind of the same situation for Max. I think he probably can handle the pressure a bit better than I could back then, but still, it’s not an easy position to be in.”

Button came home just 11 points clear of Vettel in the championship hunt, an uncomfortably close finish after being set up for a seemingly effortless canter to the title after the first seven races of the season – his mature approach to falling off the pace proving decisive as tensions escalated, an area in which Verstappen has been untested until now.

With Norris starting to show that he has the mettle to consistently exploit the potential of his car over a series of races in a championship, at a point when McLaren has indicated it is now open to introducing team orders, it’s on Verstappen to prove his star quality by winning a title with a car that is no longer the best in the business by embracing his inner Jenson Button and get this one across the line.