Verstappen F1 dominance a challenge for Liberty Media

Verstappen is on a record-making ten-race-win streak with his latest Italian Grand Prix win, at Monza on Sunday. Making it his 12th GP victory of the season, only RBR teammate Sergio Perez has won this season. The manner in which the Dutch ace is tearing through breaking books this season is jaw-dropping. Unique, so savour it!

But not everybody gets it, and also the reasoning does tend to run dry - with so many sports to compete against - a series already decided in terms of the 2023 F1 Championship, is hardly a turn-on unless for die-hard fans.

Speaking during a Goldman Sachs event Maffei said: "Obviously, the challenge is Max Verstappen who is having an unbelievable year or record-setting year. Stefano Domenicali is rightly trying to pivot and say: Come watch this historic event, you've never seen success like this, you don't want to miss it.

"We'll see if that works... The midfield is quite interesting, and we can show statistically there's more overtaking than has ever occurred," added Maffei.

The reality is Verstappen can win from anywhere on the grid as he has often shown. Of late, he is destroying his teammate Sergio Perez, also his only challenger for the title. But the truth be told, Verstappen could go on holiday now and still win the Championship. In other words, it's over long before the final whistle so to speak.

Barring "breaking his legs" which Maffei suggested as a joke, Verstappen has proven to be unbeatable since May and could well go on to win every race this year: "The reality is, we have a very attractive competitive product, other than the fact that Max is that fast. Short of breaking his leg, a la Tonya Harding, I'm not sure what we can do about that!

"But he's a phenom. He's driving what seems to be the fastest car and he's driving it very well. If you look at the lines he's taking, how aggressive those lines are, but how well he's able to navigate them. It is truly stunning. And you can see statistically why he is faster than anybody else."

While TV figures are the holy grail of F1's income and are down reportedly, Maffei is buoyed by the sport's growing footprint: "I think you need to look at the overall interest in the sport. Viewership is a little tough.

"We've had many successes this year, I think three of the top four races here in the United States were all this year in terms of viewership, and our average viewership is up year over year. But nonetheless, there can be a specific circumstance, like last year Miami was standing alone, this year was up against a Miami Heat game in the [NBA] playoffs. Those particular circumstances can drive the viewership of a race."

Maffei explained: "If you take the totality of interest as measured by growth, not only in linear TV but how much we've grown Instagram, YouTube views, TikTok views, the amount of interest in the sport has only catapulted greater, much greater than double digits. So I'm convinced our demand is very high."

Whatever the case, F1 gained huge support during the epic, albeit controversial, 2021 F1 season in which Verstappen and Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton slugged it out for the title, decided on the final lap of the final race.

In retrospect, that season did attract a vast new audience who savoured the bitter contest, but now there is a realisation that the season was an anomaly for F1. Last-race blockbuster, championship-deciding Grand Prix title battles (like we saw at Yas Marina) are rare in a sport from which eight drivers have won the past 22 titles.

In the past two decades, Lewis Hamilton and Michael Schumacher have won seven F1 titles each, Sebastian Vettel won four, Fernando Alonso bagged two and now Verstappen is heading for number three.