In some ways, the world's most prestigious motorsports circuit hasn't changed much since it began in 1950.
There have always been drivers who won a lot, engineering masterminds, various types of controversy and teammates who plain didn't like each other, according to Peter Windsor, a longtime Formula One journalist and former team manager who put on his de facto historian hat for this story.
So if your knowledge of Formula One began with binge-watching "Drive to Survive," here's a bit of prequel content.
And if you're a longtime fan, here are a few stops along both memory and victory lanes.
No F1 driver has seen more checkered flags in two-plus seasons than Verstappen, the Dutch driver for Red Bull who has won 36 of the past 46 races. But Windsor said every era has had a dominant driver, and Jim Clark of Scotland was among the best.
In between his rookie year of 1960 and his death in a crash in 1968, Clark won two world championships and more than a third of the races he entered -- an astonishing feat considering how unreliable early cars could be. Mechanical problems cost him two additional world championships.
"In that period, he was the dominant driver by a huge margin," Windsor said. "And he was also incredibly versatile in jumping from one discipline of motor sport to another." In 1965, he skipped the Monaco race for the Indianapolis 500 and won that, too.
But Clark is far from the only name on the list. Juan Manuel Fangio of Argentina, for instance, won the championship five times during his seven seasons in the 1950s and placed second in the other two.
"You can say that before there was Max, there was Lewis Hamilton," Windsor said, and he went on to name drivers who in their primes basically owned the circuit. "I'm very hesitant to say Max Verstappen is better than Ayrton Senna, or Ayrton Senna was better than Michael Schumacher, or both of them were better than Jim Clark or Stirling Moss or Niki Lauda or Emerson Fittipaldi or any of the drivers who have been dominant in their specific era."
Formula One teammates inherently have an awkward dynamic, because when one beats the other, they can't blame the car.
"The only friends you have in a Formula One team is when one driver is categorically quicker than the other," said Windsor. "When they're both quick and they're both capable of winning, then that's when you have fireworks."
That was very much the situation on the Williams team in 1986 and 1987 between British driver Nigel Mansell and his new Brazilian teammate, Nelson Piquet. A 2023 story in MotorSport magazine dubbed the relationship "Williams' worst F1 feud," offering some compelling verbal evidence.
Mansell on Piquet: "He's got all the ingredients to be a great person, it's just that he chooses not to be."
Piquet on Mansell (via British Playboy in 1988): "Mansell is argumentative, he's rude and he's got a really ugly wife."
Piquet was a two-time world champion when he arrived at Williams, and his contract stipulated that he was the team's alpha, said Windsor, who was the team's sponsorship manager at the time. That meant he would be first in line for new parts, the better engine, etc. It did not, however, stipulate that his teammate would never be allowed to best him on the track.
"He never asked for that in the contract, because he never imagined that Nigel would be quick enough to do that," Windsor said. "And yet Nigel was. He was actually quicker than Nelson. And that's when all the trouble started ... and in the end, it all fell apart. It's because of drivers overrating themselves and not really ... being prepared for somebody actually to be doing a better job."
They raced each other hard, did their best to thwart each other on the track, and in at least one race when they both ended up on the podium, refused to shake hands. Neither won the championship in 1986, but Piquet won in 1987 despite winning fewer races than Mansell (three to six). Mansell won his championship in 1992, the year after Piquet retired.
Enzo Ferrari once estimated that a race win is 60 percent car and 40 percent driver. The secret sauce in Verstappen's car is created by the wizardry of Red Bull chief technical officer Adrian Newey and his team of engineers.
Newey, an aerodynamicist, "goes out of his way to be very logical and to identify, if you like, with a particle of air and what that air needs in order to do its job," Windsor said. "He is without doubt one of the greatest engineers in the history of the sport."
Colin Chapman, Windsor said, "was similarly accomplished." Under his direction, Team Lotus won seven constructor's championships, including the two seasons in which Jim Clark won the driver's championship.
Unlike Newey, who is constrained by more than 70 years of technical rules, Chapman operated mostly in the 1950s, '60s and '70s when the rules were being written. He focused on gaining speed by reducing the car's weight.
Some of his ideas were banned immediately, but others changed the sport and remain in use.
One of the most notable was building the car around a bathtub-like "monocoque," a pod that was rigid and strong but much lighter than the complex tubular frames cars had been built on up until that point. Today, the monocoque is known as the "survival cell," and it is a critical part of driver protection.
Chapman and Lotus produced the first F1 car that had a carbon-fiber chassis. His innovations with radiators and brakes are still in use. And he pioneered the use of ground effects (using the air under the car to generate downforce so the car sticks to the road in corners) -- the forces that Newey exploits so adeptly now.
The wildly unorthodox restart in the last race of the 2021 season kept Lewis Hamilton from a record-breaking eighth championship and was so controversial that F1 race director Michael Masi lost his job.
But, hey, at least the police didn't get involved.
The same can't be said for the finale of 1997, when Schumacher, F1's other seven-time champion, was involved in a similar winner-take-all race, and the Ferrari legend tried to run rival Jacques Villeneuve off the track.
The act was so blatant that the World Motorsport Council determined it was deliberate, the German police opened an investigation even though the race was in Spain, and, decades later, it is written as fact in Schumacher's Hall of Fame bio on the F1 website.
It also didn't work. The German ended up stuck in gravel and Villeneuve finished third with enough points to win the title. The shenanigans earned Schumacher disqualification from his runner-up finish in the championship standings, but no criminal charges were filed.
Because Fort Lauderdale youngster Logan Sargeant is the first U.S. driver in Formula One since 2015, it may seem as if Americans have always been bit players in the F1 saga.
Not so! But it has been a while since one has had a starring role.
Miami-born Californian Phil Hill and Italian-born Pennsylvanian Mario Andretti each won a world championship while flying the Stars-and-Stripes.
Hill, who was also the first American to win the 24 Hours of LeMans, in 1958, was a master technician whose prowess was most obvious on terrible tracks. He clinched the 1961 championship in the final race, but tragedy darkened his victory. His friend and teammate Wolfgang Von Trips died during the race when his car was bumped from behind, flew up an embankment and pinwheeled into a line of spectators, killing more than a dozen.
By the time Andretti won his F1 championship in 1978, he had already succeeded in just about every motor sport series. He won four IndyCar season championships, the 1969 Indianapolis 500 and NASCAR's Daytona 500. in 1967.
In Formula One, he often teamed with Chapman at Lotus to pioneer the use of aerodynamics. His 1978 victory at the Dutch Grand Prix was the most recent win by an American driver.
Windsor said Dan Gurney was as talented behind the wheel as Andretti and Hill and was an incredible engineer. He didn't win a championship, possibly because while at the height of his racing powers, he started his own team and branched out into making cars.
In 1967, he became the only American to win a Formula One Grand Prix in an American-made car, and it was one that he had designed. His Eagle is considered to be one of the most beautiful racecars of all time.
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