He won the Bahrain Grand Prix in his new RB20 with over 20 seconds to spare, taking pole position, leading every lap and setting the fastest race lap.
As a result, he's rated as a prohibitive 1/10 chance to take his fourth consecutive world drivers' championship.
And we're also back in 1/4 territory, implied odds of 80%, for him to win this Saturday's second race of the season at the high-speed Jeddah Corniche Circuit in Saudi Arabia.
His Red Bull team-mate, Sergio Perez, will look back on last year's race there fondly - the Mexican moved to within a point of Verstappen by taking a measured victory.
But that race was one of only two last season in which he finished ahead of Verstappen, and had the world champion not suffered reliability problems in qualifying which forced him to start from 15th on the grid, it's unlikely Perez would have triumphed.
Nevertheless, the Mexican delivered pole positions at the track both last year and the season before, so he will have his backers at odds of 10/1 for this race.
The fastest non-Red Bull in Bahrain was the Ferrari of Carlos Sainz, who pressured Perez during the final stint but was unable to make a move.
Sainz (20.1 to win this weekend) muscled past his pole-sitting team-mate, Charles Leclerc, and Mercedes' George Russell to take a feisty third place.
He's rated behind Leclerc (14/1) once again in the bookies' lists but edged him both in this race last year and in the overall championship.
Ferrari's impressive straight-line speed means they should be stronger than in they were Bahrain, as should Mercedes, for whom George Russell 50/1 and Lewis Hamilton 25/1 finished fifth and seventh respectively.
But it's the McLaren drivers who could earn a plethora of speculative bets in Jeddah.
Lando Norris finished a disappointing sixth in Bahrain but claimed he was "hoping this is our 'down' in terms of just tricky tracks [that] are not suited to our car. Hopefully we've got some better ones coming up."
And indeed the new MCL38 looks tailor-made for the long straights and high-speed turns of the Saudi circuit.
Norris was in his element at similar tracks last season, qualifying on the front row in Austin and taking the Sprint shootout at Interlagos.
And team-mate Oscar Piastri topped the times in Qatar's Sprint shootout and went on to beat Verstappen in the Sprint race itself.
Both look good each-way bets, particularly in the qualifying markets, where Norris is available to back at 20/1 and Piastri at 50/1
Each-way terms of one-fifth for three places means that if one of the pair qualifies in the first three, we should be in profit.
