MPH: The F1 drivers still clinging to hope of rivalling Verstappen

Reasons to be cheerful. Those of you of a certain age and disposition will know that as an Ian Dury song title. It could just as easily be a mantra for those rivals of Max Verstappen in this season to date. He’s taking the opposition apart and all those who might have had title expectations coming into the year, intensely competitive people with limited career years, are having to rationalise it while maintaining hope.

Team-mate Sergio Perez, whose title challenge has faded dramatically in the last couple of races, is perhaps the Max rival facing the toughest mental challenge. His team boss Christian Horner recently said he believed Perez’s two under-performances at Monaco and Barcelona will have relieved him of the self-imposed pressure of being a title contender. Does Checo see it like that? “I don’t think so,” he replied yesterday. “I think we always have to deliver to our maximum and we just have to make sure we deliver. We have a great car and we should be having a lot of podiums, wins and so on, from now until the end of the year…. [Max] has been able to deliver when it matters – in qualifying and he hasn’t had a bad weekend at all this year. And I think it’s what I need. I cannot afford to have any bad weekends anymore. I think I’ve had two or three bad weekends in the season, so I really have to get rid of those and keep the consistency high because I think it’s something that Max has been really good and consistent throughout this period.”

Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz were there at the Ferrari launch when the team was incredibly bullish about its 2023 prospects. That was before the truth revealed itself. Sainz is trying hard to remain upbeat. “Every weekend we have new ideas, new bits in the car. Every weekend we try something with tyres, if it’s not with tyres it’s the suspension, if not it’s the aero. We can’t fault the fact we’re trying everything and I’m sure we’ll get to the bottom of it.”

The upgrade introduced at the Spanish Grand Prix, he said, gave the team, “Important steps in our learning and understanding of the car which we’re going to try and put together here. If not we will keep trying and keep going. I see a factory full of energy to keep trying to correct the situation and the feeling. Barcelona was probably the worst possible place to bring this package to because it was always going to be our most difficult race of the year so far… [the upgrade] was a new opening of a window of development. If this window doesn’t work, we will open another one and another one, we’ll keep trying and that’s what I’m trying to say. I’m going to Maranello more often than ever. Spending more time there in between races than ever. Trying to make sure we keep the team pushing in the same direction and motivated. I see good things coming and good experiences.”

Lewis Hamilton seems like he’s still buzzing from race day in Barcelona. From his Friday summary there of, ‘the car is the car’, his assessment of the upgraded Mercedes was very different after his strong race to second there. He denied there is any difficulty in dealing with the fact he hasn’t won a race since 2021. “I don’t feel any weight,” he said. “We’ve gone through a tough patch and we’re kind of, like, on that up. And I feel that there’s been a feeling of like… for example, the last race and some of the races, it feels like we’ve had wins. It’s just about perspective. Of course, we’ve not been in first place but there have been many wins in the steps that we’ve taken. Last race, for us, as a team, to be on the podium with both drivers, that was a win for us. And so we’re just focused. We know, as I was just saying earlier, that we have that north star. We know where we need to go. We don’t know everything of how to get there but we know that together we can get there if we just keep our heads down and focus on the science. The engineering team is fantastic within the organisation. We’ve got a great development team and I honestly think we’ve got the best development rate, as good if not better than any team in the sport and so you’ve just got to keep chipping away.”