Max Verstappen’s record-equalling F1 run: 2023 Belgian & Dutch GP report

Max Verstappen was born in Belgium to a Belgian mother. But a Dutch father. He says he feels Dutch. So he had two consecutive home grands prix, one at Spa before the summer break, one at Zandvoort afterwards. It was a neat arrangement, especially when in winning them both he equalled the all-time record of nine consecutive grand prix victories (shared with Alberto Ascari and Sebastian Vettel). He dominated on each occasion, though in quite different ways.

“Bed Bull’s RB19 is by far the most aero efficient car on the grid”

If you wished to construct a circuit showcasing the Red Bull RB19’s superiority to the full, it would look a lot like Spa-Francorchamps – because of the extreme demands it makes of aerodynamic efficiency, with its two flat-out sectors sandwiching a longer one which demands high-speed downforce. The bigger the conflict between those two demands, the bigger the advantage superior aero efficiency will bring. The RB19, in deriving a bigger proportion of its total downforce from the low-drag underbody and less from the high-drag wings, is by far the most aerodynamically efficient car on the grid.

If you wished to create a track which maximised the lap time rewards of Max Verstappen’s talents, it might also look a lot like Spa-Francorchamps, because of the conflicts between a) the slow corners of the Bus Stop, La Source and Les Combes and b) the long fast corners of that middle sector. The slow corners require quick direction-change response. The fast ones require rear-end stability. In set-up terms, those requirements oppose each other. Any driver who can live with some instability at high speed can run a set-up which will buy chunks of lap time in the slow corners by minimising understeer. That’s Max Verstappen.

So with the combination of Red Bull, Verstappen and Spa, the margin of superiority over the field was immense. Even by the epic standards of Verstappen’s dominant 2023 season. It happened this way here last year too. Just like in ’22, a grid penalty (for a gearbox change this time), was but a minor inconvenience on his route to the front and subsequent comfortable victory.

Verstappen had qualified fastest by 0.82sec over Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari on Friday when the damp conditions meant no DRS deployment. For the Saturday Sprint event Verstappen had qualified on pole (also in the damp) by a scant 0.011sec over Oscar Piastri’s McLaren. The McLaren was brilliantly fast in damp conditions – partly because the team had not devoted any simulation or production time to a low-downforce Spa wing and so was running with its higher downforce wing, as its standard low-downforce item is too inefficient for Spa. Through the middle sector, in both qualifying sessions (one for the main race, another for the Sprint), Piastri was Verstappen-quick. No one else was, not even Piastri’s McLaren team-mate Lando Norris.

In the Saturday Sprint event Piastri led an F1 race for the first time and finished a good second behind the inevitable Verstappen. But in Sunday’s grand prix proper Piastri was out within a few seconds of the start, on the inside of a three-abreast squeeze into La Source which also accounted for Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari. That was two easy places Verstappen made up from his sixth place starting slot, as his team-mate Sergio Pérez slipstreamed Leclerc’s Ferrari up Kemmel Straight to take the lead on the opening lap.

It took Verstappen a few laps to make Lewis Hamilton use up his Mercedes’ battery reserves in defence so that he lost the DRS tow from Leclerc. That done, he was past the Merc and Ferrari in quick succession to be sitting just a couple of seconds behind Pérez. Then a brief, tense stalemate within Red Bull, with Max’s race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase urging him to await instructions.

What Lambiase was also repeating each lap, usually just before La Source prior to the flat-out run down to Eau Rouge, was for Max to “use your head”. It wasn’t being said as an admonishment, but as a pre-agreed reminder. It was to tell Verstappen not to remain flat through Eau Rouge, where the cars ground out and wear away the underbody plank. The single practice session had been rained out on Friday and with this being a Sprint format weekend, set-ups had to be taken into parc fermé without having tried them out. Seems Red Bull may have been a little adventurous with its chosen ride heights, with which it was stuck for the rest of the weekend. So both Pérez and Verstappen were giving a big lift just before the maximum compression point of the corner so as not to wear their planks away to illegality. So big was their advantage over the rest of the lap (partly because of the low ride height, but mainly because of the car’s inherent aero advantage) they could pull away from the field regardless.

The Red Bull pitwall was saved from having to make any awkward decisions as Hamilton triggered the first pitstops by attempting an undercut on Leclerc, which brought Leclerc and Pérez in on the next lap and Verstappen the lap after that. From there Verstappen was free to chase down and pass his team-mate, subsequently pulling out a big margin on him.

A brief mid-race light shower saw him crossed up through Eau Rouge, Pérez losing time the following lap with a moment at Fagnes chicane. But other than that, Verstappen’s eighth consecutive victory turned out to be very routine. He kept his team on edge by suggesting a third pitstop for new tyres with which to take the fastest-lap point. They resisted, Hamilton took the stop and the point. With such a margin, Red Bull can afford to give away the occasional point.

The weather tried to randomise the Dutch Grand Prix weekend, but even its best efforts could not loosen Verstappen’s grip on domination, nor dampen the partying enthusiasm of the crowds filling the old-school venue brought back into F1 existence solely by the exploits of Max. He has a whole nation behind him, its royal family here to support him, the country’s ‘Waltz King’ here to conduct an orchestra as part of the occasion, name DJs keeping the techno beat thumping for four days solid.

“The weather tried to randomise the Dutch Grand Prix”

Verstappen tries to seal himself off from all that, to treat it just like any other race. But it can’t be easy. The first two parts of qualifying were conducted on intermediate tyres but it was dry enough for slicks in Q3. Verstappen took pole by 0.537sec from Lando Norris’s McLaren, George Russell’s Mercedes, Alex Albon’s Williams, Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin and Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari. Six makes of car in the top six before Sergio Pérez in the second Red Bull, 1.3sec slower than Verstappen. Daniel Ricciardo had broken his left hand in Friday practice, crashing the AlphaTauri into the Turn 3 barriers in avoidance of the just-crashed Oscar Piastri. Ricciardo’s place was taken by Liam Lawson, a Kiwi multiple junior champion from the Red Bull stable. Thrown in at the deep end, he aimed just to get F1 miles under his belt and qualified at the back.

The weather had played its part in Lewis Hamilton qualifying only 13th, his unfortunate place in the traffic on his out-lap leaving him unable to take advantage of the track at its driest. Trying to offset his strategy, he would be the only one starting the race on the medium tyre, everyone else on the softs. But neither of those was the right tyre, as it turned out. The rain was falling heavily by the end of the opening lap, with Verstappen already well clear of the pack. Pérez took the decision to pit immediately – as did a few others further back, notably Alpine’s Pierre Gasly. It was absolutely the right call and as the slick-shod runners slithered around the second lap hopelessly off the pace, so those who’d stopped gained as much as 16sec on them. Verstappen was in next time around and rejoined 13sec behind Pérez who was now leading the race.

Thirteen seconds behind a guy in the same car after just two laps might ordinarily be the end of any realistic victory hopes. But this is Max Verstappen. His pace as he chased Pérez on the wet track was of a different order, between 2-4sec faster. He’d got to within around 4sec of him by lap 10 and now the track was drying out. Some had braved out the rain on slicks – and had fallen over 1min behind already. But now they were suddenly lapping whole chunks faster than the leaders.

“Hamilton and Russell had suffered a disastrous Mercedes strategy”

Aston Martin took this as its cue to bring Alonso in for a change back onto slicks. He was close enough behind Verstappen that it presented an undercut threat – triggering Red Bull into bringing Verstappen in a lap later. As well as retaining his place ahead of Alonso, this also had the convenient effect of undercutting Verstappen past his team-mate to assume the lead. He was never going to lose from there no matter what the weather threw at him – and it did throw plenty. Twelve laps from the end the rain returned, much heavier this time around as everyone scrambled to get back onto inters.

Verstappen was unaffected but it led to Pérez sliding straight-on at Tarzan and damaging his rear wing before rejoining, now behind Alonso. Pérez’s incident gave Verstappen more than a pitstop’s-worth of gap over second place and Red Bull brought him in again in order to change to extreme wets, rivers now running across the track. Pérez came in for the same but was prevented from leaving the pitlane as the race was red-flagged, with cars flying off track. The order was backdated a lap and restarted around half-an-hour later, a six-lap sprint on inters once the safety car had pulled in and set them off again. Alonso gave spirited chase but Verstappen had it all under control – as ever.

Pérez was penalised 5sec for speeding in the pitlane so his third became a fourth, with Alpine and Gasly being the beneficiaries, a reward for a feisty, attacking performance from the Frenchman, who had diced hard with Sainz’s Ferrari to prevail.

Snapping at Sainz’s heels for the last two laps was Hamilton. He and Russell had suffered a disastrous Mercedes strategy, as they attempted to brave out the first rainfall for a few laps but then made the inters stop, ensuring they took both the lap time and pitstop losses. McLaren made the same bad call for Norris, who followed Hamilton across the line for seventh ahead of Albon and Piastri.

There were some great stories of adventure and close shaves amid the spray and the pressured pitwall calls. But it was all just the canvas on which Verstappen painted yet another masterpiece.