- Max Verstappen looked ominously comfortable from the moment he hopped in the RB19 preseason, and was never remotely troubled.
- This year’s championship marks the first time since 2015 that the champion led the Formula 1 standings for the entire season.
- Neither Ferrari nor Mercedes made an anticipated step forward and faced a chasm to Red Bull from the outset.
Max Verstappen has clinched a third successive Formula 1 world title with six races to spare after Saturday’s Sprint Race at the Qatar Grand Prix. Autoweek looks at how it was simply lovely for Verstappen in 2023.
Verstappen In a Class of One
Best driver, best car, best team.
Those are the simple yet devastatingly effective attributes needed not just to win a Formula 1 world title but to totally dominate a season.
The combination of Verstappen and Red Bull has already gone down in history as a supreme driver/team partnership, joining the likes of Michael Schumacher and Ferrari, and Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes.
Verstappen looked ominously comfortable from the moment he hopped in the RB19 pre-season and was never remotely troubled en route to title number three.
He has not trailed in the standings all year, marking the first time since 2015 that one driver has led the entirety of the championship. If you had to compile a list of Verstappen’s top 10 drives this season then several race-winning displays would fail to make the cut.
If he was the sole Red Bull Racing representative then they’d still be on course to comfortably win the Constructors’ championship.
“I think he’s just got this inner hunger and determination and huge ability, but he channels it and he does not get distracted by some of the trappings of F1, he is an out and out racer,” said Red Bull team principal Christian Horner. “If he’s not racing in the real world, he’s racing in the virtual world. That’s his passion, that’s what he wants to do.”
Even when Verstappen has been on the backfoot he has recovered ably; from 15th on the grid to second in Saudi Arabia, from ninth spot to the win in Miami, and from a penalized sixth to a completely emphatic victory in Belgium.
If you were going to create a driver in a laboratory then Verstappen is perhaps as close to the model as you’d hope: the combination from year zero of nature and nurture, ruthlessness and total belief in his own ability and metronomically relentless. He is continually adding experience to his knowledge bank just to go along with the assurance of his achievements—there since realizing his world title dream in 2021—and speed that was present from the outset.
Engineer supreme Adrian Newey, right, was in the middle of the championship celebration on Saturday in Qatar.
Another Adrian Newey Masterpiece
Verstappen has been the class of the field but so too have Red Bull Racing.
Red Bull’s RB19 was a refinement of the RB18 which emerged as 2022’s car to beat after an initially so-so start to the new regulatory cycle.
The RB19 has been the best all-round package at every event bar Singapore, where its few inherent weaknesses were accentuated, facilitating Verstappen in streaking clear of the field.
It has not always been the fastest Saturday car—with rivals managing to snatch away four pole positions—but the race pace advantage has been such that Verstappen never had to be overly ambitious when working his way to the front.
It is another of Adrian Newey’s masterpieces but he is complemented by a strong aerodynamic team back in Milton Keynes, while the power unit regulation freeze has aided the collaboration between Honda and Red Bull Powertrains for a second season.
Red Bull’s team at the circuit have remained on top form, with Verstappen expertly guided by race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase, the strategy team fronted by Hannah Schmitz, and the pit crew delivering not only rapid pit stops but consistently quick ones.
Red Bull won 17 of 22 races in 2022 with the RB18 and the so far bulletproof RB19 has delivered 15 victories from 16 so far. That spell included a record unbeaten run of 15 events which stretched from Abu Dhabi last year through until Carlos Sainz’s Singapore victory last month.
Teammate Sergio Perez Hits a Rut
Formula 1 is littered with good drivers who were made to look ordinary when partnered with an all-time great as a teammate. There is no shame in Sergio Perez not winning this title.
Sergio Perez just didn’t have the answers most Saturdays this season. He even crashed out during the Sprint race at Qatar.
But the Mexican’s Saturday collapse across the middle part of the season contributed to Verstappen opening up an enormous points lead which he was never going to cede. Perez won two of the opening four races and emphasized the need for consistency after a bafflingly off-day on Saturday in Australia.
That proved a portent of what was to come as a Q1 crash in Monaco kick-started a five-event run in which Perez failed to qualify inside the top 10 and left himself a mountain to climb on Sundays.
Perez was 14 points behind Verstappen after the fifth round in Miami but that gap grew by a staggering 85 points across the following five events, taking his title prospects from highly unlikely to downright unfeasible.
In a dominant car finishing second is the expectation but Perez faltered after his early wins; it did not cost him the championship—very few people would believe such a scenario possible—but it allowed Verstappen to surge clear and wrap up the crown even earlier.
Several other drivers would ostensibly extract greater performance, and results, from a car as good as the Red Bull RB19. But other drivers of Perez’s caliber, or even better, would still be firmly shaded by a once-in-a-generation talent such as Verstappen.
Lewis Hamilton is third in the championship standings, but the seven-time champion has less than half of Verstappen’s point total this season.
Simply No Consistent Rival in ’23
Up front it has been one of the dullest and dreariest seasons in Formula 1 history, and the clincher being in a Sprint Race at a soulless facility feels rather fitting. But that’s not the fault of Verstappen.
While Verstappen was scoring 25 or more points per race weekend his rivals were trading blows and took points off each other. Verstappen had several different faces alongside him on the podium during his winning spree and that boosted his overall points advantage.
Neither Ferrari nor Mercedes made an anticipated step forward and faced a chasm to Red Bull from the outset, setting the tone for a long year of reflection for the famous marques.
They were joined in the battle for best-of-the-rest by a charging Aston Martin and, from Austria onwards, a rejuvenated McLaren.
That created an entertaining season-long topsy turvy battle to be best-of-the rest – it was only a shame it wasn’t for overall honors.
Mercedes has been only occasionally second-fastest while Ferrari’s form wildly fluctuated after a tricky opening to the season. Aston Martin began brightly, faded through the European season, before it rallied, at least in the hands of Fernando Alonso, and faded once more. McLaren, which started the season in the doldrums, vaulted into contention with its mid-season upgrade to the extent that Lando Norris has been the second-highest points scorer since.
“He and the team have been phenomenal this year, faultless,” said Lewis Hamilton. “They’ve raised the bar. As a team we have to look at that and be, okay, these are the areas we have to be better to compete and be better. I do hope at some point we can fight them, actually have them in a defending position, you know? But they should definitely enjoy the moment because they’ve worked for it.”
What’s Next?
It is perhaps worth circling back to this corresponding feature from when Verstappen comfortably won the 2022 world title.
We wrote the following: “With a strong car, strong team, flailing rivals, and stable regulations, this could just be the opening phase of a Verstappen/Red Bull dynasty. Records only recently amassed by Hamilton could yet be threatened by the new two-time champion.”
There’s little reason to doubt that the same is still true. Verstappen is 12 months older, during which time he has added another world title to his name, and another dozen or so victories, bringing his tally to 48.
That puts him fifth on the all-time list, within reach of Alain Prost (51) and Sebastian Vettel (53). In terms of victories the Verstappen/Red Bull partnership is already the third-most successful in history, behind only Hamilton/Mercedes and Schumacher/Ferrari. He has only just turned 26, is contracted to Red Bull through 2028, and the regulations remain relatively stable for the next couple of years.
Red Bull’s rivals have all undergone various degrees of pain and learning through 2023 but for all of them there remains a sizeable performance deficit. Verstappen’s margin of victory in most races has been 20 or so seconds and that’s without needing to push the envelope of performance. Regulatory stability allows them the time to close in on Red Bull, who ostensibly have a lower improvement ceiling because of their current advantage, but there is less than five months until the start of the 2024 season.
Time is already ticking. Red Bull, too, will still find gains, and you’d expect a team of their stature and resources to address the few underlying weaknesses, as arose in Singapore. And while they will still have the least development time because of their position in the championship they will no longer be burdened by the penalty for breaching the 2021 cost cap.
There will be hope and expectation that Mercedes delivers with its W15, Ferrari builds a package to contend for glory, McLaren continues its strong upwards trajectory, while Aston Martin rebounds after falling away through the season.
The smart money, obviously, is on Verstappen and Red Bull remaining way out in front in 2024.
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