Japanese Grand Prix: 'Max Verstappen shrugs off doubters with crushing statement win'
- Published
Verstappen has won a record 13 races in the RB19 this year
Max Verstappen arrived in Suzuka for the Japanese Grand Prix with the intention of sticking two fingers up to the naysayers in Formula 1 - and left it having proved in the most emphatic way his and Red Bull's superiority over the field this year.
The Dutchman's 13th victory in 16 races this season came at the end of probably his most impressive overall performance of a year in which he and the team have dominated the field in a manner rarely seen in F1 before.
Verstappen said that his aim going to Japan was to win the constructors' championship at the first chance they had - and mission accomplished thanks to his crushing victory.
But he was just as motivated to prove a lot of people wrong after Red Bull's rare off race in Singapore a week before.
There, for the first time this year, Red Bull were off the pace and looked ordinary. Verstappen's record-breaking run of 10 consecutive wins came to an end, as did Red Bull's sequence of winning every grand prix this year.
But what irked Verstappen more was the innuendo that Red Bull might have achieved their unprecedented success unfairly.
Singapore followed a technical directive from governing body the FIA aimed at clamping down on the use of flexible floors and bodywork. So when Red Bull struggled in its aftermath, some in rival teams drew what they felt was an obvious conclusion.
Verstappen found the insinuations insulting, and set about proving it in Suzuka. From his first lap in practice, he was on a mission. That lap - nearly two seconds quicker than anyone else, including his team-mate Sergio Perez, despite being on hard tyres - left mouths agape. And he continued on like that for three days.
Fastest in every practice session. Fastest in all three qualifying sessions. A lap on his first set of tyres in final qualifying more than 0.4secs faster than anyone else. On his second, he really went for it. He was 11km/h faster than before through Turns Four and Five in the Esses, and the result was pole by more than 0.5secs. And 0.8secs quicker than Perez.
Team principal Christian Horner described that as "one of the best qualifying laps of all time".
And when afterwards Verstappen was asked whether he was trying to prove a point, he said: "Honestly, yeah, we had a bad weekend [in Singapore]. Of course then people start talking about… 'ah, it's all because of the technical directives'. I think they can go suck on an egg.
"I was just very fired up to have a good weekend here and make sure that, yeah, we were strong."
Horner said he knew what was coming before the race weekend had started.
"I played padel tennis with Max on Wednesday," Horner said, "and he was properly fired up, and made it clear. He said: 'I want to win the race by 20 seconds.' And in fairness he came within 0.7secs of achieving that.
"You could tell from the very first lap in P1 - when on the hard tyre he was 1.7 seconds quicker than the rest of the field on medium or soft tyres - that he was totally focused on this event.
"It is a circuit he loves and enjoys. It is one of the ultimate driver circuits as a test around here. It was an outstanding performance.
"Max is absolutely at the top of his game. He's the best driver in F1 at this point in time and everything has to come together - car, driver, team in total harmony."
'Max is one step too far'
Verstappen's weekend in Japan - as so many times this year - contrasted heavily with that of team-mate Sergio Perez. Verstappen has scored enough points to lead the constructors' championship on his own.
Horner claimed after the race that "either driver is pretty much leading the constructors' championship at the moment". But that's an exaggeration. Perez's total would put him fourth, ahead of Aston Martin but 80 points behind second-placed Mercedes.
When Perez won his two races early in the season, Verstappen was a close second. Horner pointed out that Perez had finished second behind Verstappen six times - but he has also not done so on a further eight occasions.
Japan was perhaps the nadir of his season. And perhaps a metaphor for it, too - lacking anything like Verstappen's pace, he was beaten by two McLarens and a Ferrari in qualifying and his race was littered with errors.
Damage to a front wing on a first lap can happen, but Perez then earned himself a five-second penalty for inadvertently passing Fernando Alonso's Aston Martin on his way into the pits to have it changed.
And not long afterwards, impatient to make up ground, he damaged his car again - this time terminally - in a clumsy and over-ambitious attempt to pass Kevin Magnussen's Haas.
The only 'bright' spot was that, after spending 26 laps in the pits, Red Bull made the decision to send him out for a couple of laps again so he could serve the penalty he was given for hitting Magnussen, thus preventing him serving it again in Qatar next time out.
The gulf in class has been obvious all year. And while everyone in F1 accepts that the Red Bull is the best car in the field and believes that a number of drivers could do better than Perez in the Red Bull, it is weekends like Japan that have people up and down the pit lane wondering how much of Red Bull's utter domination this season is down to the car, and how much to Verstappen.
As McLaren team principal Andrea Stella put it when asked after the race whether his team could challenge Red Bull at any point before the end of the season: "That's still a step too far. In fairness, it looks if it is Max who is one step too far."
The team have won six constructors' titles now
'Dominance is what you want to try to achieve'
But Perez's toils could not detract from either Verstappen's excellence or Red Bull's greatest achievement so far in F1.
The race was a foregone conclusion, even if one of the McLarens had managed to get ahead of Verstappen at the start, as first Oscar Piastri and then Lando Norris threatened.
And after it, Verstappen paid tribute to his team's achievement - their second constructors' title in a row and sixth in all, won with six races still to go.
"The season we are having is incredible," he said. "We can be very proud of that and I think we will in a few years' time look back on it and it probably brings a smile to your face to remember what we have achieved.
"Apart from Singapore we have been dominant and that is what you want to try and achieve as a team all the time.
"It is just an incredible season for everyone involved and I'm just very proud to be a part of it and to be working with all these amazing people at the track and at the factory as well.
"They are doing a lot of hard work to make sure our cars are in the best shape, are developed through the year and prepared for the year after."
Team principal Christian Horner has been with Red Bull since 2005
'We could never have dreamt of a season like this'
This car, the RB19, has been designed by a team under Red Bull chief technical officer Adrian Newey, who has an increasingly unarguable reputation as the greatest designer in F1 history.
Newey has been ably assisted by the leadership team that has been established in recent years of technical director Pierre Wache, head of aerodynamics Enrico Balbo, head of performance engineering Ben Waterhouse and chief designer Craig Skinner.
Head of trackside engineering Paul Monaghan and sporting director Jonathan Wheatley have been with the team since before their success began back in the late 2000s.
The car is a development of last year's RB18, which set the trends for the new technical rules introduced last year that nearly all teams are now following.
And it was created last winter, and finessed during this year, against the backdrop of Red Bull's punishment for breaching the budget cap in 2021.
As champions, they already had the least amount of permitted aerodynamic research of any team under F1's rules, and the punishment reduced it by a further 10%. And yet their rivals have not closed at all in the course of the season, if you exclude the outlier of Singapore.
"Coming into the season," Horner said, "I don't think we could have ever dreamt of having a year like this.
"We have been fairly limited in the amount of development we have done on the car, but the amount we have done has been effective enough to maintain a reasonable margin we have seen today.
"Last year was a very strong year for us but to have kept that momentum rolling with the challenges we've had is testament to all the men and women who have worked tirelessly to produce a car as competitive as we've had, and the drivers - and in particular Max - have been able to make such good use of.
"We have the same gearbox on the car as last year], we have the same chassis largely as last year. An awful lot of it has carried over from last year and the team have done a great job in efficiently developing the car and reducing the weight.
"The whole technical and operational team have done an amazing job to maintain across the variance of circuits we had this kind of performance.
"To produce the kind of car we have and achieve these kind of results has been an incredible performance."
Can they be challenged next year?
Advantages such as this are rarely closed in one winter, although the huge steps made by Aston Martin into this year and McLaren during it have given their rivals hope.
But F1 people are realists as well as optimists, and that hope is well under control. As both Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc have said at various points this year, catching Red Bull next season will be extremely difficult.
"What Red Bull and Max are doing is just phenomenal," Stella said. "So I would just like to congratulate them and say: 'Hats off' in absolute terms.
"I don't think they need comparisons. They are setting references in the history of F1."