Max Verstappen: ‘Is my title tarnished? Not at all. I really deserved it’

Max Verstappen has been quiet since stepping back from the wild drama and surreal shootout of the last lap of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in which he overtook Lewis Hamilton and won his first world championship in December. After the elation, as well as the bitter controversy and angry appeals from Hamilton’s Mercedes team, Verstappen has needed time to recover. But now, on a tranquil afternoon in Milton Keynes, he is ready to slip back into the cockpit.

The new Red Bull car, RB18, will be unveiled on Wednesday afternoon but, first, Verstappen takes a fresh spin around the final lap of the race that brought such a gripping Formula One season to its tumultuous conclusion. The grand prix and the championship had been blown apart by the decision of Michael Masi, the race director, to allow a one-lap lottery between two great drivers who had been fighting for supremacy all season. Until Nicholas Latifi crashed his Williams car with just five of the 58 laps of the race left, it had looked as if Hamilton would deny Verstappen and make history by winning his eighth driver’s title.

Mercedes had been much quicker the whole race and Christian Horner, Red Bull’s team principal, admitted live on television that they needed “a miracle”. It duly arrived in a staggering sequence of events. Latifi crashed and, after much procrastination, Masi made the fateful choice to allow five lapped cars to overtake the safety car so that the wide gap between Hamilton and Verstappen would be replaced by a head-to-head race for the chequered flag.

Hamilton still had the much quicker car but he was on worn tyres – while Verstappen was racing on new rubber. But Hamilton is perhaps the greatest driver in the history of Formula One and the 24-year-old