'Cracking the code' was key to Verstappen's Spanish GP dominance
Mark Hughes
Max Verstappen stormed to F1 victory in Spain ahead of a resurgent Mercedes. The key to his success, writes Mark Hughes, was coping with the tyre-shredding Barcelona surface
Verstappen claimed victory in Spain along with a third career grand slam
Modern Formula 1 is all about tyres. More now than ever. Heavy, super-powerful cars loaded with more downforce than any before can overwhelm the tyre quite easily. When that challenge is magnified by driving around a circuit full of high-speed, long duration corners, the tyre becomes even more disproportionately important.
When the Circuit de Catalunya dispenses with the previous slow section at the end of the lap and the final turn becomes a flat-out seventh gear blast, well…Tyre performance, getting the left-front to stay alive in the race, getting it to wake up for one lap of qualifying on a cool track – two conflicting demands – was way more important even than downforce.
You needed to crack the tyre code before you got access to all your car’s natural performance. So we had a mixed-up kind of grid behind Max Verstappen’s dominant pole and a further mixed-up order of competitiveness behind him on race day. Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari and Lando Norris’ McLaren cracked the tyre code in qualifying and lined up second and third.
But this was Verstappen’s weekend in a way that completely overwhelmed everyone else. The Red Bull RB19 was finally unleashed on a fast corner track and its advantage was verging on ridiculous. But the tyre code needed to be cracked first – which Verstappen did by total joyous commitment to the unreal level of cornering performance the car can generate.
By race end, Verstappen finished 45 seconds ahead of Sainz, despite both cars starting on the front row
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It was a virtuous circle. Sergio Perez in the sister car could get nowhere near in the cool of qualifying, the front tyres never reaching the critical threshold of temperature, leaving him unable to even make Q3, over 0.6sec slower than his team mate in Q2.
In stark contrast, the McLaren – for reasons even the team doesn’t fully understand – is extremely good at generating front tyre temperature in cool conditions. Norris and Oscar Piastri both made Q3 and Norris proceeded to star, while fully expecting to fade on race day. He did, but for reasons other than tyre temperature; he took his nose off on the back of Hamilton’s car at Turn 1 on the opening lap but had no great pace after rejoining.
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The tyre demands of qualifying and race day were totally different but equally extreme. Qualifying was about generating heat, race day was about dissipating it. The Ferrari was poor at the latter. The Mercedes was good, allowing Hamilton to be on Sainz’s tail as the first stops approached.
Ferrari brought Sainz in, Hamilton stayed out for nine further laps yet still rejoined just behind the Ferrari, such was Sainz’s tyre deg. On his much fresher tyres, Hamilton made a simple on-track pass and was followed through a few laps later by the other Merc of Russell who’d made eye-catching progress from 12th on the grid. He was all the way down there partly because he’d not cracked the tyre code in qualifying, but Hamilton had.
Partly that was about a set-up difference, with Russell attempting to run the car low and triggering high-speed bouncing as a result. Running at the gentler pace demanded by the tyres on race day, that wasn’t an issue – and that was still a way better pace than those cars which had qualified around him.
Russell surpasses Alonso on his way the third at the 2023 Spanish Grand Prix
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One of those he passed was Fernando Alonso in the Aston Martin, quickly leaving him behind to put passes on Esteban Ocon’s Alpine and Stroll’s Aston, all of them dismissed with ease as he made his way to the target: Sainz’s Ferrari. He flew by that shortly after the second stops, Sainz’s older tyres the penalty for that early stop trying to defend from Hamilton. The Aston was as far off the pace as the Ferrari on race day, especially on the soft tyre. This isn’t normal 2023 form; it’s specifically tyre-shredding Barcelona and the way it had of exaggerating differences in tyre performance.
Red Bull was conservative in its starting tyre choice, putting both Verstappen and Perez on mediums, with almost everyone else on softs. It gave Verstappen a few tense seconds fighting off Sainz into Turn 1 and obliged him to run the hard tyre – which he didn’t like – for the middle stint. But there was a time when on tyres 20-odd laps old he was lapping way faster than the new-tyred opposition. He got a black and white warning flag for track infringements, which made his engineer nervous when he targeted the race’s fastest lap on his soft-tyred final stint. He needn’t have worried. This was an almost casual dominance.
Perez had a less attacking first stint on his mediums than Russell on his softs so took longer to get through the midfield pack. But he was able to pass Sainz before the end for P4.
Verstappen led the field into Turn 1, and never looked back
Grand Prix Photo
There was another Ferrari in this race, that of Charles Leclerc, but there was something seriously amiss with it, something mechanical within the chassis but not defined. The Ferraris both ran relatively low downforce, which was quicker over a lap but bad news for tyre deg.
The Astons of Stroll and Alonso were a low-key sixth and seventh ahead of Ocon. AlphaTauri’s Yuki Tsunoda after a race-long feisty battle with Zhou Guanyu was ninth across the line but the 5sec penalty he took for his OTT defence against the Alfa Romeo dropped him well out of the points, promoting Zhou and Pierre Gasly to the final points positions.
Days like this will be what Verstappen’s 2023 campaign will be remembered for. When he ran out front serene and the opposition scrambled around far in his wake, the colours behind him jumbled up from race to race.
