On a summer afternoon in the French countryside 55 years ago a 26-year-old racing driver named Giancarlo Baghetti climbed into the cockpit of a single-seater Ferrari. He had qualified 12th, down among the also-rans in his first world championship grand prix.

Just over two hours later, after averaging 120mph over 52 laps of a circuit laid out on fast, flat public roads cutting through cornfields outside Rheims, in temperatures approaching 40C, he flashed past the chequered flag to take victory by a tenth of a second from his nearest pursuer.

At the wheel of a car loaned by Enzo Ferrari to a team formed with the aim of giving experience to young Italian drivers, he had beaten the superstars of the era, including Stirling Moss, Jack Brabham, Wolfgang von Trips, Dan Gurney, Graham Hill and Jim Clark.

In its way it was the most remarkable result in the history of Formula One – until last Sunday, that is, when Max Verstappen became, at 18 years and 228 days, the youngest grand prix winner in the sport’s history, just over a year after becoming F1’s youngest ever driver when he was not even old enough to hold a driving licence in his native Holland. He has that licence now. He also has the distinction of being widely acclaimed as a certainty for greatness, and there are few reasons to challenge that prediction after the way the he took his Red Bull to victory at the Circuit de Catalunya last weekend.

The Dutch teenager’s first season with Toro Rosso – Red Bull’s junior team, used for driver development – proved that he was quick, with an aggressive approach to overtaking that was probably already there when he first drove a go-kart at the age of three, having overcome the insistence of his father, Jos, a former grand prix driver, that he should wait until he was six. The boy’s talent became obvious as soon as he started beating rivals several years older than him. He has been doing it ever since. On Sunday he came home a few metres ahead of a man who is exactly twice his age: Kimi Raikkonen, a former world champion and the winner of 20 grands prix.

Verstappen didn’t want to hang around when he was three, and the same is true today. In his approach to his career, he has shown the kind of ruthlessness that characterised the early progress of Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher and Sebastian Vettel. And he has a powerful patron in the shape of Dr Helmut Marko, the former racer who runs Red Bull’s young driver programme and was Vettel’s mentor. Two weeks ago Marko brusquely demoted Daniil Kvyat to Toro Rosso in order to head off strong interest from other powerful teams, notably Ferrari, in Verstappen. The sudden promotion means that, despite a third place in Shanghai last month, the career of the 22-year-old Russian now comes under the heading of collateral damage.

That’s how it is in Formula One today. In Baghetti’s time, regular fatalities ensured a constant replenishment of talent. During his six-year career, the funerals for top drivers included those of Von Trips, Lorenzo Bandini and Ricardo Rodríguez, the Verstappen of his day, who was only 19 when he put his Ferrari on the front row at Monza in 1961 but perished a year later in Mexico City, in front of his home crowd. When one ace died, another took his place. In the last 20 years, only one driver has died in a grand prix. Former champions such as Raikkonen, Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso drive on into their mid-30s, while the young aspirants form an impatient line.

By landing a seat in one of the handful of teams capable of winning races, Red Bull’s new star has jumped a queue including such drivers as Stoffel Vandoorne, the highly rated 24-year- old Belgian who is currently McLaren’s reserve driver, and Pascal Wehrlein, the 21-year-old German who, in the manner of a Chelsea starlet farmed out to Vitesse Arnhem, is currently on loan from Mercedes to the Manor team.

Verstappen’s approach is the 21st century’s sharp-elbowed equivalent of Juan Manuel Fangio’s instinct for moving from one team to another, sensing which would bring him success in any given season.

At Rheims in 1961 Baghetti had good fortune when the three works-entered Ferraris, the odds-on favourites, all faltered. Luck was certainly on Verstappen’s side in Spain, when Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton, also racing certainties to finish first and second for Mercedes, took each other out on the first lap. A difference between the Italian and the Dutchman is that at the end of his career Baghetti went quietly into retirement without having finished another race higher than fifth. By winning first time out, he had exceeded his limits. What is absolutely certain about Verstappen is that, barring misadventure, he will win many more races.

If his speed and competitive spirit were already established, the last 22 laps of Sunday’s race, which he spent fending off Raikkonen’s assault while nursing a set of rapidly wearing tyres, also demonstrated his intelligence, his racecraft, and his sensitivity to the abstruse parameters that govern performance in modern F1. Tyres play too great a role in today’s grand prix racing, but it was stirring to see a driver controlling, rather than being controlled by, the rate at which his rubber was being worn into uselessness.

Afterwards he said that the last 10 laps had been like driving on ice, but he held off his Finnish pursuer – a master of racing on frozen lakes, as it happens – without a hint of anxiety.

Formula One likes its dynasties. The Ascari, Hill, Villeneuve and Rosberg families all produced at least one world champion. The Verstappens look like being the next. But soon enough Formula One’s latest race winner may be glancing in his rear-view mirrors and glimpsing Mick Schumacher, the son of his father’s former team-mate, who is 17 years old and challenging for the Italian Formula Four Championship in a team with strong links to Ferrari.

Next weekend Verstappen goes to Monaco, where a year ago he illustrated the contrast between his father’s era and his own by walking away without a scratch after crashing head-on at high speed into the barrier at St-Devoté. In Jos’s time, such an accident would have shortened his legs by a few inches. In Baghetti’s time, it would have killed him. It’s not hard to conclude that the ruthlessness of today’s young grand prix drivers, on and off the track, is somehow connected to that crucial difference.