Such was the ease with which Max Verstappen was cruising to victory at yesterday’s Belgian Grand Prix, he joked with his race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase about coming in for one more pitstop.
The Dutchman called it pitstop practice, the aim being to win the only point to have eluded him for the fastest lap on a weekend of a sprint/race double in which he had won everything else.
Verstappen has now won 19 of the past 23 grands prix and leads the championship by 125 points. It is simply a matter of when not if he will be crowned a three-time F1 world champion.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner was almost apologetic in his assessment of the first half of the season, as Formula 1 prepared to pack up for the summer break.
“It might not be popular with the fans because it’s predictable,” he said. “But to go in unbeaten into the summer break is mind-blowing. We want to keep the momentum going.”
Red Bull have barely shown a blemish all season. This may be clutching at straws but their rivals’ one hope is that their reduced wind tunnel time — punishment for breaking the cost cap during 2021 — will eventually have an impact.
But that came into play in October, so one wonders how much further ahead they might be without such limitations.
It has been the one counter-argument that Horner has pushed in race interviews after each dominant win.
The only issue is their rivals do not seem to be using their own increased wind tunnel time consistently well enough and, as a result, no clear rival appears to be emerging to close the gap.
At the past three races, McLaren seemingly came from nowhere after a disastrous start to the season to become the best of the rest. But once the Spa track dried, they disappeared without a trace — Oscar Piastri into a wall and Lando Norris into an unassuming seventh place.
The hope is Belgium was a mere anomaly but the confusion is that much of Red Bull’s rivals do not seem to know how to get their car into its sweet spot for a race weekend.
Take Mercedes, for example. Lewis Hamilton did well to finish in fourth place but was nearly 50 seconds off the pace, the equivalent of more than a second a lap to Verstappen.
Hamilton talked of struggling with the rear end of the W14 — a regular grumbling from the seven-time world champion in 2023 — and the bouncing (the aspect that perhaps most defined last year’s car) was back with a vengeance in Belgium.
“They don’t know why,” said the Briton. “To me, it is a concern.”
For the former dominant force of the sport, there is still a perplexing lack of understanding for why and where their car is quick or not.
It throws up an inconsistency of results but they are by means alone in that. At the weekend, Ferrari proved the best of the rest in contrast to some previously difficult weekends.
Podium finisher Charles Leclerc said the result finally gave “me a bit of a smile and many guys at the factory and the track” but he countered by adding “it’s still not a completely happy face”.
Red Bull’s remaining rivals, Aston Martin, appear to be disappearing without a trace. Fernando Alonso had six podiums in the opening eight races, but in the past four grands prix he has not finished higher than fifth.
The early feelgood factor at the Silverstone outfit is beginning to ebb away.
It leaves team bosses with plenty to ponder in their summer break— in the case of Mercedes’ Toto Wolff in the Austrian mountains — and scratching their heads how to close the gap on Red Bull.
The racing resumes in 27 days’ time, ominously for the grid at Verstappen’s home Dutch Grand Prix where he has never lost an F1 race.
