Verstappen's Singapore Triumph Lifts Him to Second All-Time
Max Verstappen's victory in last weekend's Singapore Grand Prix carried weight well beyond three points on the board. It was his maiden win on the Marina Bay streets, a circuit that had long eluded him, and it pushed his tally with Red Bull to 73 victories - enough to move the four-time World Champion above Michael Schumacher's Ferrari haul and into second place on the all-time list of most successful driver-team pairings.
A record built in stages
Verstappen's association with Red Bull has produced wins in almost every conceivable fashion, from the sensational to the ruthlessly efficient. His first came on debut for the senior team at the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix, when he became the youngest race winner in F1 history at just 18. For several seasons after that, victories were sporadic, often dependent on misfortune elsewhere rather than outright pace. That changed in 2021, when Red Bull finally built a car capable of matching Mercedes, and Verstappen's season-long duel with Lewis Hamilton yielded ten wins and a first title.
What followed was a period of near-total dominance. Three further championships came in succession, including a 2023 campaign in which Verstappen won 19 of 22 races - still the benchmark for consistency in the sport's history. Even in 2025, when he narrowly missed out on another title by two points after a late surge that included six wins in the final nine rounds, his underlying pace never dropped. Singapore now adds another chapter, arriving after a 2026 campaign that only ignited with victory in Bahrain before a second commanding win on Saturday night.
Only Hamilton stands ahead
The list above Verstappen remains short. Schumacher's 72 wins with Ferrari, built across a run of five consecutive titles between 2000 and 2004, now sit just behind him. Ahead of both is Lewis Hamilton's 84 victories with Mercedes, a tally compiled over more than a decade in which the British driver became the team's defining figure, much as Ayrton Senna did for McLaren and Alain Prost did across his own multi-team career.
Closing that final gap of eleven wins will not be straightforward. Hamilton's number stands as arguably the hardest record in Formula 1 to surpass, built during an era in which Mercedes rewrote the sport's competitive balance. But Verstappen, still only in his late twenties and tied to Red Bull for the foreseeable future, has repeatedly shown an ability to extract wins from machinery that is not always the class of the field. Singapore was proof of that again.
What it means for the season ahead
Beyond the historical context, the Singapore result offers a signal for the remainder of the campaign. Red Bull's upturn in form across Bahrain and Singapore suggests the team may be rediscovering the sharpness that defined its most successful years, even after a stretch where victories were harder to come by. For Verstappen, every race from here carries dual significance - championship implications in the short term, and a growing sense that one of Formula 1's most enduring records is now within reach.
