THE JAPANESE GP IN 5 KEY MOMENTS
1
Max’s rivals are admitting defeat already
After Max Verstappen’s unexpected hiccup in Melbourne, normal service was resumed in Japan. From pole position, Max scampered away from the chasing pack to score his 57th career win, and in the process reached another career milestone. He has now led over 6,000 laps in Formula 1. While his team-mate Sergio Pérez contributed to Red Bull’s 31st one-two finish, the ease of Verstappen’s triumph led to a rather bleak assessment of the destiny of this year’s world championship from Mercedes boss Toto Wolff.
“No-one is going to catch Max this year,” he said bluntly. “His driving and the car are just spectacular. You can see it by the way he manages his tyres.” Once again, Wolf added, the main intrigue in this season will concern who ends up “best of the rest”.
Verstappen and Pérez annexed the front row in qualifying and then, given hotter conditions on race day, took advantage of the brief red-flag period to make setup changes and reduce the angle of their front wings. Max, having gone ‘higher’ with his wing settings after a troubled FP3, was initially unconvinced but the change enabled him to better manage his tyres at this rear-limited track.
As early as lap six, Pérez had run wide on the exit of the second Degner in his haste to keep up with his team-mate. From that moment onwards, Max was unchallenged around Suzuka’s highspeed twists and turns.
In the mere 196 days since F1 last raced in Japan, one team has clearly made progress, while another has slipped back. Last September, Carlos Sainz finished sixth, 50 seconds in arrears to Verstappen. In this year’s Japanese Grand Prix he was on the podium (that’s a 100% record in the races he’s started in 2024) just 20 seconds behind the dominant victor.
The improvements for Ferrari were amplified by
Charles Leclerc’s drive. With only one set of new softs for Q3, Leclerc could only manage eighth on the starting grid. He therefore decided to run a counter strategy to the optimum two-stopper. The abrasive nature of the Suzuka track, in combination with race day’s hotter temperatures, led many to fear for aggressive tyre degradation — but since the Ferrari is now kinder to its Pirellis, Leclerc managed a long first stint on mediums and
REPORT BY JAMES ROBERTS
one-stopped to an impressive fourth.
“We’ve made progress on strategy over the past three years,” said Sainz, who ran two stops and passed his team-mate with fresher tyres late in the race. “Last year we were boxed in to stop at certain laps and couldn’t extend. We had so much deg that people could extend and then come back on us with a harder tyre, so it looked like we weren’t getting the strategy right a lot of times. But when you have a car that’s better on tyres, you have that extra flexibility and your strategy looks better.”
In contrast, the Mclarens weren’t able to maintain the same race pace as Ferrari, despite Lando Norris’s strong qualifying performance (he started third, just 0.292s off Max’s pole time). With Sainz running just behind in the opening stint, Mclaren had to pit Norris early to cover off the undercut threat and Lando paid the price later on. It’s a stark contrast to Mclaren’s result here a few months ago.
“Seventeen seconds behind the win last year and today I am 29 [seconds behind],” said Norris. Mclaren was second and third last September, while the papaya cars could only manage fifth and eighth this time around.
Norris was the first of the front-runners to stop (at the end of lap 11) and then pitted again on lap 26 — the same lap that Leclerc was able to run to on his first stint.
“We’ve made a huge step in the high-speed [corners] compared with last year and on the tyre management,” said Ferrari team boss Frédéric Vasseur. “But now we have other weaknesses. It’s always a compromise; you improve somewhere and you lose somewhere else. Overall, we’ve made a decent step forward.”
Sadly, a giant leap is needed to catch Red Bull.
2 A bad day for Williams and Daniel Ricciardo
The Japanese Grand Prix was halted after just three corners following a sizeable shunt involving the RB of Daniel Ricciardo and Alexander Albon’s Williams. The damage to the tyre barriers required over 20 minutes of repair work before the race could resume from a standing start.
The nature of the Suzuka circuit means that overtaking is difficult, unless there is a significant difference in tyre life. This puts a premium on securing track position for the opening stint. As a result eight drivers gambled on starting on the soft tyre to offer them that all-important first-lap grip.
Around Turns 1 and 2, the soft-shod runners clearly had more pace, while the two RBS of Yuki
Tsunoda and Ricciardo were struggling on their medium Pirellis. Approaching Turn 3, Ricciardo looked in his left-hand mirror to see how close Aston Martin’s Lance Stroll was behind him. As he took the natural line into the corner, he didn’t see Albon had got a faster run out of Turn 2 and was virtually alongside in the short chute before T3.
Ricciardo moved across to the right, Albon tried to back out, but it was too late. Contact between the two gave the Australian an instant puncture and he spun into the barriers – while Albon joined him in the tyre wall.
Afterwards the stewards decided Ricciardo wasn’t to blame for the crash, putting it down to a “first-lap incident”. However they went on to add in their decision that on a subsequent lap, or without the presence of Stroll, then “a different determination would have been made”.
Wary of a repeat of the injury he suffered at Zandvoort last year, Ricciardo took his hands completely off the steering wheel when he made contact with the wall. Albon held on to his wheel on impact but, while he escaped injury, the damage to his car heaped more woe on the Grove outfit.
One race on from the no-spare-chassis drama of Australia, Williams had another big repair job on Friday in Japan when Logan Sargeant went off at Dunlop (he also ran wide at Degner on lap 42 of the race, but was able to reverse out of the
gravel unaided). The third big crash for Williams in a fortnight has proved very costly – upgrades fitted to the cars have been destroyed, putting further pressure on spares inventory and production, plus Albon’s chassis had to be returned to the UK ahead of the Chinese GP for repairs.
“To have three major accidents where you’ve pretty much taken out all equipment on the car is enormous,” said Williams team boss James Vowles. “We’re making spares as quickly as possible but ultimately performance will have an impact as we can’t bring as many updates [later in the year]”
3
Three cheers for local hero Yuki Tsunoda
The enthusiastic Suzuka crowd had good reason to cheer as Yuki Tsunoda became Japan’s first F1 driver to score points at their home race since Kamui Kobayashi took a podium for Sauber in 2012. While his RB team-mate Ricciardo was watching from the pitwall, Tsunoda converted his good qualifying performance (tenth) into the final points-paying position.
After losing two places on the medium tyre at the original start, Yuki’s afternoon was further compromised as his team opted for a higher downforce setup, so his RB didn’t enjoy the top speed of his rivals. He countered that by enjoying more grip in the Esses and made a couple of moves around the outside of Turn 6 on fresher rubber.
The highlight of Yuki’s afternoon came on lap 22 when his RB squad helped him leapfrog three places when five drivers dramatically dived into the pits at the same time. His crew changed all four wheels in 2.76s, to beat Valtteri Bottas (stationary for 4.94s), Kevin Magnussen (5.41s), and, further back, Lance Stroll (2.43s).
“Our team did a fantastic job, the mechanics were very fast,” said the Japanese driver. “Without them it would probably have been a lot more difficult to score a point.”
4
Mercedes fails to make one-stop strategy work
While the restart offered an opportunity to try different tyre compounds, just three cars in the original top 10 took it. Yuki Tsunoda was one, moving to softs, while Mercedes decided there was nothing to lose in restarting on hard-compound tyres and chasing a one-stop race. Inevitably, both Lewis Hamilton (7th) and George Russell (9th) lost a place each at the second start, but their hope was that the race would come back towards them as their strategy played out.
Hamilton felt as if he’d picked up some damage in the first stint and magnanimously suggested Russell should go ahead. On lap 21 the seven-time champion radioed his team to say his front-right tyre was “dead” and suggested the strategy needed to change. Russell echoed his thoughts. With over 30 laps to go, it was manifestly obvious that the one-stop was a bust for the silver-andblack cars and they both stopped for another set of hard Pirelli tyres.
By this stage the clouds were gathering and the ambient temperature had dropped, easing the degradation pressure for the medium-shod cars. Russell stopped again – this time for mediums – on lap 37, while Hamilton did the same two laps later. Having started seventh and ninth they finished seventh and ninth – albeit in reverse order.
It was a disappointing end after the promise shown earlier in the weekend. After qualifying Hamilton said he was happier with the balance of his Mercedes more than any point since the start of 2022. But then he countered that on Sunday night with: “To finish ninth is really bad…”
5
Alonso trolls the stewards after another late-race drama
Although there was no Safety Car to artificially close the field up, the fight for the minor places provided an entertaining end to the race as divergent strategies played out. Just 4.4 seconds covered the gap from sixth-placed Fernando Alonso to Lewis Hamilton in ninth, with George Russell and the second Mclaren of Oscar Piastri occupying the space in between.
Russell managed to pass Piastri on the final lap, after the Australian locked up into the chicane. But until that point Russell had struggled to find a way past. That’s because canny Alonso could see the Mercedes closing and decided to drop back and give Piastri DRS to help him repel the attack. It was the same tactic Carlos Sainz used to win the Singapore Grand Prix last year.
But following on from Alonso’s controversial late-race antics in Australia, the Spaniard joked to Spanish TV: “Let’s see if I get disqualified from the championship.”
Piastri, meanwhile, was grateful for the assistance since the Mercedes had much younger tyres at that point in the race.
“I could tell that Fernando was trying to keep me there by the way he was using his energy,” he said. “With how difficult it is to follow in these cars, it’s quite a good strategy to stop a quicker car coming through.”