McLaren steals a march on F1’s ‘best-of-the-rest’ as Verstappen still dominates

For a team in the midst of setting new Formula 1 records, Red Bull had quite a few headaches to deal with in this part of the season – and they all centred around drivers. Not Max Verstappen, who continued to bulldoze the 2023 championship with victories at Austria, Silverstone and the Hungaroring, the latter win ensuring the team has beaten McLaren’s long-standing record of 11 on the trot. But within the four Red Bull seats between its senior and junior team AlphaTauri, there was a real concern about the performances in two of them.

Red Bull is not an entity with much patience for under-delivery. It funds drivers through the categories all the way to F1. When they get to the junior team they need to show the stuff of potential champions. If not, then they’ll be passed over. Dr Helmut Marko oversees this tough process, but in close partnership with Red Bull team principal Christian Horner.

There are not all that many potential world champions around. So it’s only logical that the turnover of young drivers is high. There is always a megastar in one Red Bull, be that Sebastian Vettel or Verstappen (and Daniel Ricciardo in between). But often this high turnover has meant there has been no obvious candidate to slot alongside the megastar. Daniil Kvyat, Pierre Gasly and Alex Albon were all promising young guns promoted very quickly to that seat and in each case they were unable to deliver even an adequate support-driver role. Hence in a break from their usual policy, Red Bull employed a seasoned old pro, Sergio Pérez, to fill that high-pressure seat, while they waited for the next would-be champion.

Similarly in the junior team. The cascading consequences of demoting Gasly in the second half of 2020 led him to seek alternative employment after a couple of further seasons there. None of the Red Bull juniors were deemed ready yet for F1 and so Nyck de Vries – very fashionable at the end of last year after an impressive stand-in job at Monza for Williams – was given a chance. Not your traditional Red Bull junior, already very experienced, 27 years old and a Formula E champion. But needs must and maybe he’d deliver.

In the senior team Pérez has had his ups and downs since taking on the Verstappen support role in 2021, but at the beginning of this season was in terrific form, winning in Jeddah, holding off a recovering Verstappen, beating him fair and square in Baku, making him work very hard for victory in Miami. Then the puzzling series of misadventures – crashing out of Q1 in Monaco, failing to get out of Q2 in Barcelona or Canada, his pace having suddenly dissolved driving the exact same car with which Verstappen was running rings around everyone.

“At the beginning of this season Pérez wasin terrific form”

“He just needs a good result,” said Christian Horner in Canada of his charge’s extended loss of form. “That will settle him and he’ll be back.” But exasperation was beginning to creep into Horner’s reaction in Austria after Pérez had repeatedly had his laps deleted in Q2 for track limit infringements. The laps were at least quick, but they didn’t count. He lined up 15th in a Red Bull.

“He’s got the pace today,” Horner pointed out. “He’s got a car that was easily capable of being on the first or second row. He was matching Max’s times. Stay in the white lines! It was strike one, strike two, Checo, just stay in the white lines! Strike three, and that was it. So I mean, just hugely frustrating because he could have been there, he could have done it, so that’s the frustration. It’s fantastic that we got the pole, but it feels not complete.”

He made amends, of sorts, in the race, coming through the field well enough to take third. But so he should have done in a car which Verstappen had driven to a composed, dominant victory well clear of Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari.

Meanwhile de Vries was struggling too. He’d not been able to match team-mate Yuki Tsunoda all season. The only hint of strong pace came in Baku but he’d then crashed out. The pressure was building. In Austria he qualified last. The team decided to change the set up and start him from the pitlane. From there he finished an unremarkable 17th and took a penalty for pushing Kevin Magnussen off-track (they’d also had an incident in Canada).

De Vries was under more pressure even than Pérez, with no F1 reputation to fall back on, no previous proof that the performances were in there somewhere. But both were under pressure. Especially given the identity of the team’s official reserve: Daniel Ricciardo. When he had returned to the Red Bull simulator after his difficult two seasons at McLaren, he was a long way off from the driver they remembered. But he’d been working hard through the season, working with his old engineer Simon Rennie. His simulator pace was improving and he was making no secret of his ambition to somehow find his way into the seat he’d turned his back on four years earlier.

Onto a packed Silverstone then, where unstoppable Verstappen reeled off his seventh victory from nine races despite being beaten off the line by Lando Norris in a McLaren transformed by a big update made in Austria. It took only four laps for Verstappen to find his way past and canter to victory. Norris hung onto second, driving a brilliant defensive race from the attacks of a softer-tyred Lewis Hamilton on the restart after a late safety car.

But Pérez yet again had failed to make it into Q3 – the fifth consecutive time. He was slightly unlucky in that he was first of a whole bunch of cars to begin his final lap on a drying track. But even so, the car directly behind him – Alex Albon’s Williams, ironically – made it through. He made fairly heavy work of his recovery drive, rising only as far as sixth and being held off to the flag by George Russell’s Mercedes.

As for the lacklustre de Vries, he had another unremarkable outing in the now uprated AlphaTauri. Half a second slower than Tsunoda in qualifying, he finished one place behind him in the race.

Red Bull stayed on at Silverstone for the Tuesday Pirelli test. Driving the RB19 would be Ricciardo. It was a massive moment for him. “Within 11 laps he did a time which would have put him in the front row of the grid for the grand prix,” was how Horner summarised the session. De Vries was released from AlphaTauri with immediate effect – and Ricciardo would be making his headline-grabbing return at the following race in Hungary.

“Vertstappen took the lead into Turn 1 and disappeared for the day”

He was just about to complete his first lap on Friday in FP1 when the session was red-flagged: it was Pérez, who had gone off, taking off the left-corner of the Red Bull in an inexplicable crash on his first flying lap of the weekend. The mechanics prepared for a quick rebuild.

“Every sports person will know those phases,” said a watching Nico Rosberg in his role of Sky pundit. “Where you’re in such a dark hole and you’re struggling to get out of it. It just keeps getting longer and longer. We’ve all had that and Sergio’s in that now. The problem is self-doubt creeps in. You start to worry, ‘Hey, I’m just not going to be able to do this any more.’ You start to get scared and it becomes a downward spiral because it takes away capacity and you’re not driving the car properly because you’re thinking about all these things.”

There were no more major errors from him and he at last returned to Q3, albeit only with the ninth-fastest time, 0.6sec slower than Verstappen, who had lost out in a pole battle with Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes by 0.003sec.

There was no contest on race day though, Verstappen taking the lead into Turn 1 and disappearing for the day, winning by over half a minute. Red Bull’s 12th consecutive victory broke the record of McLaren set in 1988, also with Honda power. Hamilton lost to Lando Norris again, just as at Silverstone, the McLaren driver taking his second consecutive runner-up spot. Team-mate Oscar Piastri had run in that position in the first stint but later lost time with excessive tyre deg and a floor damaged while trying to fend off – Pérez. Checo had made some aggressive passes in a recovery drive much more convincing than that of Silverstone. Undercutting his way past Hamilton, he rejoined well in front of the Mercedes and was able to apply some late pressure to Norris’s second place. He was at least back on the podium.

Asked if this was a good foundation to recover his confidence he replied, “Yes, this sort of performance will help and now I look forward to being on the podium every single weekend. I need to keep it up.”

“His recovery was brave,” said Horner. “His pace was fast, the way he made things happen, passed Fernando, passed Sainz. He was on fire today.” It was good public support from the boss but in reality the minimum sort of performance expected of him.

“Ricciardo’s strong consistent pace took him past Tsunoda”

Especially given Ricciardo’s comeback performance, which was quietly impressive. He out-qualified Tsunoda only by a few hundredths but that was the difference between graduating from Q1 and not. Once there, he put the car 13th on the grid ahead of Lance Stroll’s Aston Martin and Pierre Gasly’s Alpine. A few hundred metres into the race he was hit hard up the rear by Zhou Guanyu’s Alfa in an incident which took both Alpines out. Ricciardo restarted last but finding the car undamaged pressed on, catching the tail of the field and moving up as some of those ahead pitted. His switch to hard tyres at the first stops was intended to be the basis of a very long second stint. But after 13 laps, rather than waiting to get time-consuming blue flags as Verstappen was about to lap him, he reasoned it better to pit, to get out of sequence with the cars ahead (including Tsunoda) and use the clear air to make up time. This worked brilliantly well and his strong consistent pace took him past not only Tsunoda but also five others. At the end of the race he was catching the Alex Albon/Valtteri Bottas battle for 11th place. He was grinning his big grin afterwards. It felt like he’d never been away, he said. And there’s more to come, he added.

Enough to build a path back to the Red Bull seat? That also depends upon Pérez.