Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen have tied up and hate each other.

This Formula 1 season includes 22 races. With 25 points each for the winner and one more point for the driver who drives the fastest lap – plus three special qualifying sessions with up to 3 points on offer – a driver could collect 581 points in an impossibly perfect season. (The exact number of races varies from year to year.) He could also score 0 if he never finished in the top 10, as was the case with Mick Scumacher and Nikita Mazepin from the Haas F1 Team this year. Mathematicians agree on what totals are possible for the best drivers in the world over the entire season, but they largely agree that the two best drivers of any year would tie in 21 of those 22 races: it’s extremely unlikely and they being won doesn’t happen very often.

But here Max Verstappen from Red Bull and Lewis Hamilton from Mercedes are going into the last race of the season on Sunday at 8 a.m. Eastern Time in Abu Dhabi. For the first time since 1974, the two winners are tied before the final (369.5). Her fight on Sunday is a true winner, rare in a sport with 18 other cars on the track. It’s also packed with narrative subplots. It feels like a moment that may not come for a long time, for reasons based on stats, personalities, and upcoming changes in the sport. If you are literally getting a high from the best athletes in the world trying to destroy each other, then Sunday’s race could be a one-of-a-kind sporting event.

It’s not uncommon for the two best athletes in a sport to be head-to-head with everything at stake, even if you don’t count the encounters between team sports legends. (Did Tom Brady and Peyton Manning ever really go “head-to-head”? Not exactly.) Grand Slam tennis tournaments come in at number 1 and number 2 in the world quite often. Muhammad Ali knocked out Joe Frazier. Usain Bolt ran a lot against Justin Gatlin or whoever his greatest rival was at any given moment. These are special events and it feels silly to follow them up with a “but”. If there is, it is that because of competitive formats in these sports, they will continue to take place. The best swimmers will continue to achieve medal ranks in the Olympics. The best tennis players will continue to meet at eye level on Center Court at Wimbledon. The best F1 drivers will fight for championships well into the season – in 2008, Hamilton won his first title on the last lap of the last race – but they usually won’t do it at a dead end where the whole season could go up on something as minute as one of them finished 10th and the other 11th. That won’t happen on Sunday, just because Hamilton and Verstappen are supposed to end up in the top two or three.

To add to the experience, Hamilton and Verstappen don’t seem to like each other massively. In July, Hamilton kicked Verstappen out of a race in an incident that earned Hamilton a meaningless 10-second penalty in a Grand Prix that he won anyway. Verstappen tweeted how disrespectful it was for Hamilton to celebrate his win. Verstappen’s boss, Red Bull team boss Christian Horner, called Hamilton, a 36-year-old seven-time champion, an “amateur”. In the fall, Hamilton made Verstappen concerned whether the now 24-year-old Dutchman was feeling the pressure associated with the battle for his first title. “I think I’m very relaxed about all of these things and I really can’t care about them. I’m very cold, ”replied a convincing Verstappen. At the race in Saudi Arabia last week, Hamilton described Verstappen as “damn crazy” when the Red Bull driver made contact with Hamilton at lightning speed. The defending champion said Verstappen didn’t care about the rules and was “over the limit”. Most of the time, Verstappen is somewhere between insanely aggressive and aggressively insane. Verstappen’s father Jos, a former F1 driver, has weighed that his personal relationship with his son’s rival is “nothing” that I would have suspected.

At the start of the last race, Verstappen and Hamilton are tied, but not exactly tied in the championship race. Verstappen has won nine of Hamilton’s eight races, which means that if neither of them scores points, then Verstappen would be on the line to win the championship. That, combined with what may have been an attempt by Verstappen to crash into Hamilton last week (I honestly don’t know; I’m still a fairly new fan of the sport), has spurred fans and media alike to turn to asking if Verstappen could purposely take out both himself and Hamilton to win the title over the tiebreaker. This is less absurd than it sounds; some believe that it happened in 1994 and that the 1990s season was due to similar circumstances. In this case, title leader Ayrton Senna defeated both himself and his challenger Alain Prost in the penultimate race when Prost had to beat him to stay ahead in the championship. Incredibly, there is a video of Verstappen reviewing footage of the Senna Prost crash, discussing Senna’s obvious strategy, and saying, “I mean, why not?” Years later, former Formula 1 champion Jackie Stewart said that Senna had admitted to him that he had purposely turned off Prost. Senna, who died in an accident on the track in 1994, is Hamilton’s racing idol.

Horner says Verstappen is a better driver than Hamilton and doesn’t need exceptionally dangerous technical details to win the title. Verstappen insisted that he was just trying to win the race. If Verstappen clashes with Hamilton this week, there will be intense debate over whether he did it on purpose. That could be difficult for the FIA, however (imagine winning the title race in a conference room), and it could be even more difficult if – just to make a hypothesis – Verstappen’s Red Bull team-mate Sergio Perez does something von Staubup with Hamilton. There is also a precedent for this type of chaos. Red Bull also owns another F1 team, AlphaTauri, and a more conspiratorial-minded person might wonder if someone from that team would join Hamilton. Again, I’m new here and wouldn’t blame anyone for inappropriateness. The man who oversees the Formula 1 races accidentally warned the drivers of the race this weekend that any unfair behavior could lead to a point deduction in the championship.

Basically this is a classic sports story about a young lion, Verstappen, who tries to overthrow an old master who is at the forefront of his game. But there’s enough window dressing around it that it isn’t a heartwarming underdog story, even if you put aside the likelihood that one of the drivers would be delighted if the other collided at high speed while letting himself go free and clear.

At its core, Formula 1 is about rich people who hate each other and make cars drive insolently fast. Hamilton vs. Verstappen is a good encapsulation. I’m one of the legions of Americans who recently became aware of the sport after watching Drive to Survive, an influential Netflix show about F1 that naturally acted as intrepid propaganda for the sport. The show borrows from everything that is fun about F1, especially the fast cars and interpersonal dramas. It doesn’t focus much on the Hamilton-Verstappen rivalry that didn’t get underway until this year, though the actual racing season is far more entertaining in that regard than any dramatized documentary. Netflix also avoids pointing out F1’s regular dealings with authoritarian governments and big tobacco, much like the league-operated broadcast networks often act as state media for American sports associations. But the most entertaining thing about Formula 1 is not upset right now: the greatest driver of his time is both in a gripping title race and in a mutual hatred of a worthy rival.

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The race on Sunday is the climax of an outstanding one-on-one series. It will be fleeting not only because the title race will be over after that, but because impending changes in the sport make Hamilton-Verstappen sequels of this magnitude difficult to come by. In 2022, F1 is introducing a new car model that promises to make it easier to overtake other drivers – something that could shake up the sport in general and make it harder for drivers who are used to running in front. A recently introduced budget cap for auto development will be lowered in 2022, which doesn’t flatten the playing field, but it may introduce a touch more parity. Also, Hamilton is 36 and could be near the end of his career. (The German grandmaster Michael Schumacher, who currently shares the seven-title record with Hamilton, finally retired in 2012 at the age of 43. His first resignation was six years earlier.)

Mercedes and Red Bull could remain the dominant teams for another decade, and Hamilton could remain dominant long enough to give their rivalry with Verstappen a multi-year climax. The only thing that is certain is that on Sunday one person will entrench himself at the top of Formula 1 and the other will despise it with the fire of millions of suns.