George Russell finally gets debut F1 win

The opening of this three-race sequence featured Red Bull reeling from the loss of its inspirational founder Dietrich Mateschitz and having its cost cap breach penalty formalised. But on track the steamroller continued unabated, with Max Verstappen setting a new all-time record for the number of victories during a season and Red Bull sealing its fifth constructors’ title. But even for the most dominant teams, the next banana skin can be just around the corner.

Verstappen’s dominance of the season might give the impression that he simply turns up, drives and wins the race. That actually happens quite rarely and despite the sophistication of the simulation tools used by all the top teams, there is almost always a set-up puzzle to work through first. Even at Red Bull. That was the case at both Austin and Mexico City, where the puzzle was solved. At Interlagos, it wasn’t.

Around the Circuit of the Americas in Austin it was all about how to access the theoretical peak grip of the soft tyre over a qualifying lap. With its long, fast corners and bumpy surface this track intensifies the generic 2022 challenge of balancing the front and rear tyre temperatures. The fronts generally want to run too cool, the rears too hot and so the preparation lap is an intricate, complex dance of brake bias, throttle and entry speeds, different for each corner.

The Red Bull drivers invariably have more to do on the prep laps than Charles Leclerc or Carlos Sainz in the Ferrari, which tends to bring its front tyres up to temperature more quickly. At most tracks it’s nothing more than an inconvenience but around COTA it was more; such was the mismatch of demands on the two axles that there seemed to be no combination on the Red Bull which allowed it to do an uncompromised fresh-tyred lap. Only on pre-used scrubbed tyres could the fronts be ready by Turn 1 after a single preparation lap – but with a scrubbed set you lose out on the sheer peak grip of new rubber.

The Ferrari – with a less intricate system of front-brake shrouding than the Red Bull – could get those front temperatures for Turn 1 and thereby enjoy new tyre grip for the lap. For his first Q3 run Verstappen tried a scrubbed set of softs and although he had a new set for his final one, he took two preparation laps.

“Either way, I just ran out of rubber before the end,” he reported. He didn’t mean it literally, just that the tyre had given its best before the lap was over. It was either that or being slow at the beginning of the lap. There was no ideal for the Red Bull and hence Ferrari qualified 1-2, Sainz ahead of Charles Leclerc, though the latter was taking a 10-place grid penalty for a new power unit, promoting Verstappen to the front row.

For some reason the even-numbered side of the grid had better grip off the line than the pole side, a phenomenon seen through the whole field at the start. This was doubly unfortunate for Sainz because not only was Verstappen leading before the first corner, but the Merc of George Russell was snapping at his heels. As they exited the first turn, Sainz tried to cut across to the left to position himself better on Verstappen on the run down the hill – but Russell, having locked his brakes, hit the side of the Ferrari, spinning it around and puncturing its radiator. With Sainz out and Russell losing momentum, the other Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton was right with Verstappen and thus was the first phase of the race set.

Although the Mercedes was 0.6sec adrift of the Red Bull in qualifying it tends to be very easy on its tyres – and that’s always a valuable asset around this track which induces such high degradation and which, as usual, was set to be a two-stop. Verstappen was able to ease steadily away from Hamilton through the first stint, enough to allow him to simply respond a lap later to when Hamilton was brought in for his new tyres and still emerge more than 5sec clear of the Mercedes.

“On peak pace, the Mercedes was still no match for Red Bull”

Russell’s wing-damaged Mercedes ran third, thereby keeping the also wing-damaged Red Bull of Sergio Pérez off Hamilton’s back, though Pérez would leapfrog Russell at the first stops. On peak pace the Mercedes was still no match for the Red Bull; it was faster through the high-speed downforce-demanding Esses, but slower everywhere else, especially on the straights. But Hamilton’s position had been boosted by the grid penalties of Leclerc and Pérez and the retirement of Sainz – and he was thus in position to apply pressure to Verstappen after the latter’s margin was wiped by a safety car, as Valtteri Bottas beached his Alfa in the Turn 19 gravel.

No sooner was the race restarted than Fernando Alonso’s Alpine got airborne after clashing with Lance Stroll’s Aston Martin on the back straight – and the safety car was out again. Alonso, who had started a grid-penalised 14th, had been attempting to take eighth from Stroll. After his heavy landing, he made it back to the pits for a new nose and rejoined last. He would come through the pack all over again and be fighting for seventh by the end. Quite remarkable.

The safety car interruption had allowed the long-running Leclerc, from his penalised grid slot, to make a cheap first stop and thereby leapfrog past Russell up to fourth. He would later make an exquisitely judged pass on Pérez under braking at the end of the back straight to go third.

The safety car came at a bad time for leader Verstappen. Not only had it wiped his margin over Hamilton but it obliged him to push quite hard on the restart so as to be out of Hamilton’s DRS reach when the feature would be re-enabled after a couple of laps. Hamilton was able to bring his tyres in much more progressively and after a few laps Verstappen was struggling on rubber which was damaged – and Hamilton was closing. He got close enough that by lap 34 Mercedes was able to pit him in a genuine undercut attempt on the lead at the second stops. It was set to have worked even if Verstappen had not subsequently been delayed by a wheel-gun failure when coming in on the next lap. Hamilton’s out-lap pace was significantly better than Verstappen’s in-lap could be on the old rubber, and that would have been enough for Hamilton to take the lead anyway.

As it happened, Verstappen’s 9sec delay in the pits lost him not just the lead but also second to Leclerc – who came in on the same lap as Verstappen. There were 21 laps left for Verstappen to make up 11sec and two places. Could he do it? Of course he could. With the tyre re-set, the Red Bull regained its previous performance advantage. He went past Leclerc four laps later, using DRS down the back straight – and set off after Hamilton. Lapping around half a second faster, he was on the Merc’s tail after a further six laps. There followed a game of battery usage cat and mouse between them until, eventually Hamilton was all out of charge and Verstappen sailed by under DRS with a speed difference of 25mph at the same place he’d passed Leclerc.

Hamilton gave chase for a couple of laps and both were given black and white warning flags for track limit infringements but eventually Hamilton’s rubber was spent and Verstappen took a comfortable victory. “In just over 20 laps he passed two cars, made up 11sec on me and pulled out a further 3sec,” noted Hamilton. “That’s some serious pace.”

Leclerc maintained his third place over Pérez, with fifth-placed Russell taking a late stop for a set of soft tyres on which he was able to take the fastest lap point. Best of the rest was ‘won’ this time by McLaren’s Lando Norris in sixth as he fended off the remarkable Alonso. Red Bull was officially the world champion constructor.

In the high altitude of Mexico City a week later the conundrum for Red Bull was slightly different. With the second Friday practice devoted to 2023 Pirelli testing, it was the third practice on Saturday morning before everyone began to get a proper read on the track, with qualifying set for just three hours later. That practice session revealed two important points for Red Bull. The car was not giving Verstappen a good enough front end. He couldn’t lean on it the way he likes to. The second point was that the draggy but high-downforce Mercedes was in very good shape around a track where the thin air doesn’t create as much drag as usual and where every extra increment of downforce is gold dust. So the car which had been 0.6sec slower than the Red Bull just a few days earlier in America was here bang on the pace.

That was with a track temperature of 39°C. Another property of the thin atmosphere here is that a bit of sunshine will send the track temperature soaring and by the time of qualifying it was hovering around 50°C. That increase since the practice session had not only reduced the grip of the track but – helpfully for Red Bull – had completely changed the limiting end of the car from the front to the back, as everyone’s rear tyre temperatures became the defining factor.

Suddenly, the Red Bull was in its balance sweet spot and Verstappen was in shape good enough to fight for the pole with Russell. Hamilton’s power unit (like Pérez’s) was refusing to run cleanly, another hazard of the altitude. Up until the entry to the stadium section on the final laps of Q3, Russell was neck-and-neck with Verstappen but took just a little too much entry speed into Turn 12 and was forced to run wide across the kerbs. Thus the 0.3sec by which Verstappen officially took pole didn’t reflect how close things actually were.

“Verstappen cantered to the victory and a new seasonal win record”

Mercedes, uncertain whether this was going to develop into a one-stop race or a two, avoided committing to a one-stop. If it turned out that one-stopping was the best strategy, it didn’t believe that a combination of a soft and medium would give the necessary range to do the 71 laps. So it hedged its bets by starting on the mediums, feeling that it would be obliged to switch to the hards if it was a one-stop.

Seeing this, Red Bull – which had opted to start both cars on softs – was surprised but encouraged, for it believed even if it was a one-stop, it could do it on a mixture of soft and medium. Red Bull was correct, thereby exaggerating its natural advantage.

It was a one-stop race, the soft and medium combination was able to deal with that and Red Bull was always on a better tyre than Mercedes. Verstappen won the start, pulled away and cantered to a 15sec victory for a record-breaking seasonal win tally of 14. Within seconds of the start Russell was forced wide over the Turn 2 kerbs, allowing Hamilton to nip by and for Pérez to then slipstream past for third up to Turn 4. That defined Russell’s day. Pérez might have been in a position to undercut Hamilton for second at the stops but a delay with a sticking wheel nut prevented that, securing Hamilton runner-up spot once more.

Ferrari, running its turbo turned down because of reliability concerns in this atmosphere (see F1 Tech), was in a ‘no-man’s’ part of the field, with Sainz and Leclerc finishing a very subdued fifth and sixth, well clear of the usual midfield battle behind the big three teams. Daniel Ricciardo’s McLaren ended up taking that unofficial class win with seventh place, courtesy of a long opening stint where he was able to get onto the softs for the last 26 laps, which gave him a big grip advantage over the five old-tyred cars ahead of him after he pitted. He passed them all in a late flurry, though not without an incident with Yuki Tsunoda for which he took a 10-second penalty. He pulled out more than that margin over Esteban Ocon to secure the position, making for a rare bright spot in his season.

“It was a bright spot during Ricciardo’s otherwise poor year”

Brazil – one of the three Sprint format events of the season – featured Kevin Magnussen taking a pole position for Haas in the one-lap window at the start of Q3 that was the optimum for slicks on the damp track, before the rain returned. Verstappen was alongside him on the front row but had chosen medium-compound tyres for the Saturday Sprint because of excessive degradation the team was seeing on the softs in practice. Although Magnussen was quickly demoted down to the car’s natural position (he would finish eighth), Verstappen could not hold onto the lead either and was passed in quick succession by the soft-tyred cars of Russell, Sainz and Hamilton. With Sainz taking a five-place PU grid penalty, it made it an all-Mercedes front-row for the main event, with the Red Bulls on row two.

Russell followed up his Sprint win with his first grand prix victory, won from the front and under intense pressure from Hamilton for the last few laps. An early collision between Hamilton and Verstappen reprised 2021 and sent the Red Bull to the pits for a new nose, but even without that delay the Red Bull was lagging behind Mercedes, with excessive front tyre deg. Sainz filled the podium. Pérez on his medium tyres had been lying a distant third but was left as a sitting duck by a late-race safety car restart as the soft-tyred cars behind him – Sainz, Leclerc, Alonso, Verstappen – flew by him. He’d been instructed to let Verstappen past on the understanding that he’d be given the place back if the latter could not pass Alonso. He couldn’t, but didn’t give the sixth place back. The title-winning team was thus in some turmoil behind closed doors as its drivers’ personal scores were settled. Russell, crying with joy, would not have been too concerned about that.