The Suzuka corners that separate F1 greats from the good

Stand trackside, on the outside of Suzuka’s Esses on a sunny day, and you are high enough up to get a sense of the land in which this most special of tracks resides. Look down in the direction of Turns 1-2, beyond you will see the waters of the Ise Bay and behind that, through a misty shimmer, the mountains of the Aichi prefecture. Look in the opposite direction, up the hill; beyond the track all you see is sky for that’s how steep it is climbing here. Often that sky is menacing or grey of course and in which case you see nothing of the bay or the mountains. Sometimes you can barely see the course. It’s a serious place, foreboding at times, a hardcore piece of race track.

It’s also incredibly demanding. The Esses run from Turn 3 to Turn 7, all interconnected. The commitment starts at Turn 3 and is rewarded – or its lack punished – all the way through the whole section where you are turning the wheel pretty much non-stop for around 20sec, first one way, then the next, pivoting the car around the front tyre so wasting the minimum of time rotating but not so suddenly to upset the rear, using the sensitivity of the left foot on the brake pedal to help it turn without losing momentum, then that of the throttle foot to keep the tyres on the edge, without ever going over it into time loss. It separates the great from the good very effectively. A whole sequence of team-mates of Michael Schumacher, Mika Häkkinen and now Max Verstappen have lost chunks of time there. Interestingly, those of Ayrton Senna and Lewis Hamilton, not so much. Gerhard Berger was a close match for Senna through here, Nico Rosberg similarly for Hamilton.

But a look at the comparison between Verstappen and Sergio Perez through this section last weekend was illustrative. Verstappen’s pole lap was 0.773sec faster than Perez’s fifth-place equivalent. 35% of that difference was through the Esses. Before they arrive at the Esses Verstappen has taken a chunk of time out of him through being around 6mph faster through Turns 1-2, but by the time they arrive at Turn 3 to begin the Esses sequence they are travelling at near-identical speeds. Turn 3 is a left hander with an exit that places you on the right-hand side of the track just as you need to be on the left for the closely-following right-hander of Turn 4. In that transition, Verstappen’s speed never falls below 237km/h (147mph). Perez’s drops to 215km/h (134mph). In just that tiny length of track, Verstappen has pulled out 0.136sec over his team-mate. There probably isn’t another section of track in the world so demanding that such an advantage can be found over such a small distance. The advantage just keeps building and by the time they are rounding Dunlop to end the section Verstappen has pulled out a further 0.177sec.

Back in 2000 we in the media didn’t have access to such detailed telemetry as provided by the GPS data today. But Jenson Button impressed enormously by turning up here in his rookie season, never having seen the place before. In qualifying his Williams fifth, he was fastest of all through the Esses. Faster even the title-duellists Schumacher and Häkkinen in their much-faster Ferrari and McLaren respectively. Even though he was 0.8sec down on them through the lap, that could very feasibly have been the difference between a 2000 Ferrari-McLaren level of car and that of Button’s Williams FW22. The speed through the Esses was only partly about how much downforce for how little drag, or how much horsepower; more than that, it was – and is – about how much momentum can be maintained by the apparently conflicting demands of huge commitment but extreme sensitivity. Button is a driver still misunderstood by many F1 fans who think of him as a good second-level guy, like David Coulthard or Rubens Barrichello, who happened to get into the right car in 2009. But he was way more than that at his best. On his good days he was better than anyone else out there, and the specific demands of the Esses have a way of revealing what a driver’s ceiling is. Button’s was always super-high. In his career he just couldn’t string that level of performance together in the way of the greats, who always find a way.