2021 F1 season: Abu Dhabi drama as Lewis Hamilton’s dreams evaporate

Although it was impossible not to admire the combined brilliance of Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton in the first seven years of the hybrid formula, it had been dragging on a bit. For the sport’s sake, he needed competition.

There was a driver, Max Verstappen, whose combativeness had marked him out as the pretender to Hamilton’s throne. But Red Bull couldn’t provide him with a title-challenging car. He’d been there five seasons and had only a handful of victories to show for it. But no one – not even Hamilton – was in any doubt that this was the heir apparent.

If ever Red Bull could give him a car competitive with Mercedes, we had the possibility of seeing what history had denied us before: the Moss vs Clark battles, or Clark vs Stewart, Stewart vs Lauda, Senna vs Schumacher; a definitive season-long battle in equal cars between the king of the pride and the challenger.

Remarkably, a little twist of the regulations for ’21 helped give us exactly that. A snip of the floor and rear brake duct vanes worked against the low-rake Mercedes concept and in favour of the high-rake Red Bull. Together with big strides made by Red Bull’s engine partner Honda in matching the Mercedes PU, it made for two closely matched cars, with Hamilton in one, Verstappen in the other.

As a generality – and with exceptions – the Red Bull had the edge in the first half-season, the Mercedes in the latter. So they went at it, the king and pretender. Hard. The advantage see-sawed between them. Hamilton, never quite sure how to handle Verstappen’s aggression wheel-to-wheel, could no longer afford the luxury of just giving him room, knowing he’d pass him later. So he tried naively at Imola for round two to hang on around his outside – and was mercilessly bundled over the kerbs. It happened again like that into the first turn at Barcelona – Verstappen was taking the yield-or-we-crash approach and Hamilton was yielding. By the time they got to Silverstone, Hamilton was trailing by 32 points. He could no longer yield. Lap one, the approach to Copse corner and the most controversial accident since Michael Schumacher’s day unfolded as Hamilton sold Max the outside dummy, dived for the inside and staked his claim. Verstappen raced as he always did – no-compromise. Circumstances had put Hamilton into a dangerous place to make his point. They each expected the other to back off. Verstappen, on the outside, was always vulnerable; he hit the barriers at 51g.

With added antagonism between the teams, they each continued to deliver unreal performances. They arrived at the Abu Dhabi season finale on equal points. That the outcome was decided by an invalid call the race director was not empowered to make was galling – because of how it was arrived at. It would have been just as galling had the positions been reversed. But even that nonsense couldn’t deny the brilliance of the contest we’d witnessed up to that point.