Max Verstappen claimed his fourth consecutive drivers’ championship as George Russell won the Las Vegas Grand Prix on Sunday.

Lewis Hamilton finished second to make it a Mercedes one-two, with McLaren’s Lando Norris sixth – a result which ended his title hopes.

There are two races to go, in Qatar and Abu Dhabi, with the constructors’ championship still to be decided. Ferrari have narrowed the gap on leaders McLaren to 24 points.

BBC F1 correspondent Andrew Benson answers your questions going into this weekend’s Qatar Grand Prix.

Like Sebastian Vettel, Max Verstappen is a four-time champion, all-time great racer, grounded, funny, thoughtful, normal, eloquent, but always cast as the villain. Why? – Nick

Max Verstappen is indeed an all-time great on the track and off it. Yes, he is also grounded, funny, thoughtful, normal and eloquent, along with a number of other likeable characteristics. “A great guy”, as Lando Norris put it earlier this year.

At the same time, there is no question that Verstappen is an uncompromising racer, and that in certain circumstances he drives in a way that some people find unacceptable.

For an example, look back to the interview he did with BBC Sport at the beginning of the Las Vegas weekend, in which he said he would never let anyone overtake him around the outside.

Verstappen is basically saying there that if someone tries to overtake him around the outside, he would feel entitled to push them off the track. For him, that is a perfectly acceptable approach.

Many drivers and other people experienced in F1 would not find that an acceptable attitude. People feel that overtaking around the outside should be possible, if the driver trying it has got his car into the right position, and pushing someone off just because they are having a go should not be allowed.

If Verstappen is painted as a villain in some quarters – and it’s hard for me to judge, because I don’t do it – it’s probably because of this approach to racing.

Verstappen admits that he is two different people in and out of the car.

Is this Max Verstappen’s most impressive title win yet? With an inferior car for much of the year, he has consistently maximised his results. – Ieuan

The answer to questions such as this is always going to be subjective. And that’s summed up in one of Verstappen’s answers in his post-race news conference in Las Vegas on Saturday night.

It was put to him that this was his most impressive championship yet, and he said: “I think so too.”

But the answer was more nuanced than that – he made it clear he was not saying he felt it was his best season.

“Last year I had a dominant car,” Verstappen said. “But I always felt not everyone appreciated what we achieved as a team.

“Of course the car was dominant, but it wasn’t as dominant as people thought it was. So that for sure is my best season because even if, in places, we didn’t have the best set-up, in the races we were still capable to win.

“But I am also very proud of this season because – I would say for 70% of the season – we didn’t have the fastest car but actually we still extended our lead.”

The reality is that Verstappen has been driving at an incredibly high level for a long time now – and you can date it back to 2018.

He went through a tricky time at the start of that year, making mistakes in the first six races of the season, culminating in a crash in Monaco final practice that prevented him taking part in qualifying, when he had been looking as if he might dominate the weekend.

Inevitably, that led to questions as to whether he needed to change his approach, and his public response at the next race in Canada was to say: “I get tired of the questions. If I get a few more, I might headbutt someone.”

But that race was a turning point. Verstappen added more control to his driving, dialled it back a bit, and he has been outstanding ever since while retaining his intense competitiveness.

So, while last year he had a dominant car, it was one his team-mate Sergio Perez made look ordinary.

But to retain that level of control and consistency in a season in which Verstappen did not have the best car for much of it – and he was defending a lead – is highly impressive.

Do you think Lando Norris and McLaren are consistent enough to mount a season-long title challenge next year? – Ed

Norris certainly thinks so.

“Next year we will go into the season with a car we think we can win the championship with from the first race, and I’m very excited for that.”

Norris insists he “has what it takes” but admits he has “some things to work on, for sure”.

The same applies to McLaren.

In Las Vegas team principal Andrea Stella reflected on McLaren’s season. “If we remove the first few races of the season before the Miami upgrade, we see we have a trajectory from a drivers’ championship point of view that means Lando could compete with Max,” he said.

“This is one of the unthinkable achievements we have to positively acknowledge at McLaren, thinking of where we were even 18 months ago.

“I’m very proud of how rapidly Lando is picking up from the situations he experiences on and, to some extent, even off track to become a better and better driver.

“I am not sure this is acknowledged enough externally. There is more acknowledgment of the missed opportunities, rather than recognising that Lando is on a strong trajectory and he was in a condition, once McLaren had the material, to win races to keep the pace with Verstappen.”

It’s now up to McLaren and Norris to prove they can do it over a whole season – as a team to start the year with a competitive car and keep it through 24 races, and for Norris to try to raise his game to Verstappen’s level.

When was the last time a drivers’ championship was won without the fastest car on season average? – Juha

This is a really difficult question to answer, because how do you define what is the fastest car? You can look at average qualifying performance for the fastest car outright over one lap, but that is not always the same as the fastest car in the race. And what about the driver factor, and how much difference that makes?

On that basis, the question contains an incorrect assumption. It implies that the Red Bull has not been the fastest car on average in qualifying so far in 2024. But actually it has – by 0.078 seconds.

However, that number is skewed by Red Bull’s domination of the early races. Because if you take the average only from Miami onwards, when McLaren introduced their major upgrade that transformed their pace, the McLaren is fastest, by 0.038secs.

And over the second half of the season, that number goes up to 0.124secs.

Anyway, the answer to the last time a a driver won the title in a car that was not the fastest over one lap is 2021, when the Mercedes was a touch faster than Verstappen’s Red Bull.

Before that, it’s 2012. Which is an answer that might surprise you, at least in some ways.

The championship battle that year was between Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso. And it is rightly hailed as Alonso’s greatest season, for taking the title to the final race in what was the fourth fastest car, and only losing out because he was taken out through no fault of his own at the start of two separate races.

Actually, though, while the Red Bull was considerably faster than the Ferrari, the fastest car on average in qualifying was the McLaren – but their poor reliability scuppered Lewis Hamilton’s hopes.

What changed with the Mercedes for Lewis Hamilton to go from hating it in Sao Paulo to loving it in Las Vegas? – James

It’s a really good question, and neither Hamilton nor Mercedes seem to really know the answer. After all, George Russell qualified on the front row in both races.

When Hamilton has struggled this year he has talked about lacking confidence in the rear of the car. That’s what happened in Brazil again.

He said at the start of the Las Vegas weekend: “If the team give us a car that doesn’t want to throw itself off, I will have a good weekend. On the simulator, it doesn’t do that. I drove the simulator with the set-up I had worked to have (in Brazil) and it was rapid, and we just need to know why it is not reflecting on Saturday.”

He did not have this problem in Las Vegas – but he did mess up his qualifying by making mistakes on both his laps in the final session. This was reflective of the fact Hamilton has struggled in qualifying compared to Russell in 2024.

The feeling is that Hamilton is pushing too hard in these final moments in qualifying, and that the current ground-effect cars don’t respond well to an aggressive driving style, which is Hamilton’s natural way.

Fernando Alonso has also commented on this, saying it’s sometimes better to drive just under the limit because it keeps the car’s aerodynamic platform more stable, and is therefore faster.

At the same time, generally speaking, the Mercedes has a weakness in slower corners. Turning it requires the drivers to slide the rear and that generates higher tyre temperatures. And Hamilton has struggled with that more than Russell.

Fundamentally, Hamilton has been quick this year when the car has been to his liking and he’s been comfortable with it – such as in Silverstone, Spa – both of which he won – and now Las Vegas, which he might well have won but for his qualifying errors.