"Perfect" Max Verstappen has been helped in building a huge championship lead by title rivals who have been "disasters" this season, according to Nico Rosberg.
The Dutchman has a 46-point lead over his Red Bull team-mate Sergio Perez after nine races, while Ferrari rival Charles Leclerc is three points further adrift. Both of them have been slipping further away as they struggle with errors and reliability issues while Verstappen keeps winning.
This run of consistent form is setting the record straight after a wobbly start from the Red Bull ace. Verstappen suffered car problems which caused DNFs in Bahrain and Australia, but he has won six of the other seven races that he has finished as he looks to defend his maiden F1 title from 2021.
Speaking about his season so far, Rosberg couldn't help but wax lyrical about the 24-year-old's performances. "It's been a couple of super-impressive races and he's just so confident and is driving at such an incredible level," he said on Sky Sports' Any Driven Monday show. "In qualifying, in those difficult circumstances, [he was driving] to perfection.
"The pressure he had also from [Carlos] Sainz [at the Canadian Grand Prix], it's not to be underestimated. Inside the car, it's a horrible feeling. You've done everything perfectly and then because of a safety car, you suddenly have a Ferrari behind you with a triple DRS zone – so much pressure.
"If you make just the slightest of mistakes, he is gone, he is through, and you lose the race win. He just managed that so perfectly and it is really impressive. That's so much lap time that you gain by having triple DRS. I'm not sure what the calculation was but it's definitely more than half a second a lap. And with the Ferrari's speed anyway, that was so difficult."
While the 2016 champion had nothing bad so say about Verstappen, he was keen to point out that the Dutchman's title defence has been made much easier by stuttering the form of his main competition. While Verstappen won in Montreal, Perez failed to finish with a mechanical issue and Leclerc could manage only fifth, having started from the back with a grid penalty.
"Leclerc, on the other side or all of his other championship competitors like Perez, they are just having a disaster at the moment with so many things going wrong," added Rosberg. "George Russell is only 15 points behind P2 in the championship. That really tells you how messy everyone else's season has been if George, with the car that he has, is so close."
