When will Max Verstappen win the 2023 F1 championship?

Prepare F1‘s fluffy red throne. Max Verstappen can win the 2023 championship at this weekend’s Qatar round, and looks likely to clinch the title before the Grand Prix itself, needing just three points from the sprint race to guarantee the crown.

With six races remaining, only Verstappen and Sergio Perez have a mathematical chance of winning the championship, and Verstappen has effectively got it sewn up.

After winning the Japanese Grand Prix while Perez retired, Verstappen now has a runaway lead of 177 points, with a maximum of 180 points available. Even if Sergio Perez wins every single race and secures all fastest laps from now until the end of the season, verstappenonly needs a total of three points from the remaining races to secure the title.

So as long as he finishes sixth or higher at the Qatar sprint, he’ll be sure of the championship. In reality, an even lower finishing position will probably be good enough,. with Perez not looking on form so far this weekend.

As Daniel Ricciardo showed earlier this year, accidents can can affect anyone, but even if Verstappen was ruled out for the rest of the season, Perez would need the 25 points for winning every remaining race (plus the sprint victories) and to pick up four of the six remaining points for fastest lap. So far this season, he’s chalked up an average of less than 14 points per race.

The table below shows the gap to Verstappen and which drivers can still technically win:

F1 championship points after Round 16, Japanese GP

When will Max Verstappen win the F1 championship?

Qatar Sprint race

This might not be the scenario that anybody was hoping for, but Verstappen will likely be crowned 2023 F1 champion at the least-atmospheric point of the season: the Qatar sprint race.

He left Suzuka with a 177-point lead and as long as he ends the sprint ahead by at least 172 points, he’ll be champion: sixth place or higher will guarantee it, no matter where Perez finishes.

Although there are a maximum of 172 points available after the Qatar sprint, the mathematical possibility of a tie wouldn’t keep the title race open: in this instance, the number of race victories this season would decide the championship and Verstappen will always have more.

Qatar Grand Prix

If Verstappen hits trouble in the sprint, he’ll still claim the title unless Perez finishes in the top three. And that would most likely only likely delay the inevitable until Sunday’s Grand Prix.

United States Grand Prix

If Verstappen retires in both Qatar sprint race and Grand Prix, while Perez scores maximum points in, then we would simply arrive at the Circuit of the Americas in the same situation, with Perez needing victory and Verstappen just three points.

In theory, this could persist until the end of the year if Verstappen suddenly hits car failure after car failure, sprinkled with a series of driver errors. In reality, there’s a better chance of Nicholas Latifi coming back than that happening.

On course to win the most F1 championship points in a season

Once he’s won the title, where does Verstappen go next?

The graph shows what will happen if he and Perez continue to score at the same rate as they have done throughout the year. Both drivers’ average took a knock after Singapore but, even so, Verstappen has won just under 23.5 points per race this year (7.3 in sprints). Perez has a GP points average of 13.9 and 5 in sprint races.

The figures above were calculated after the Singapore GP, so Verstappen is already ahead of the projection which puts him on 560 points at the end of the year: a lead of 225 over Perez and an enormous 106 more than last year’s points haul, which is currently an F1 record.

In the not-entirely unrealistic scenario where he wins every race from now until Abu Dhabi, He’d finish on 574 points, and that’s without taking fastest lap points into consideration. Note too that if the Emilia Romagna GP had been held this year, he would likely have a shot at a 600 point total in 2023.

How can Perez win the F1 championship?

When we say that Perez’s championship chances are almost entirely theoretical, this is what we mean: he’s 177 points behind Verstappen and has six race weekends to close that gap and score an extra point (as mentioned, a tie won’t help him).

To put it bluntly, the outlook is bleak. If he continues this year’s average points score of 13 points per grand prix and 5 points per sprint, he’ll win an extra 93 points by the end of the year. That would barely halve the gap, even if Verstappen didn’t score a single additional point.