Red Bull operating at a remarkable level but F1 dominance nothing new
Only time will tell where Red Bull’s 2023 car stands in the Formula One pantheon but for the moment what will be proved at the Japanese Grand Prix is that it is one of the most dominant cars to have competed in the sport. Indeed, compete is almost disingenuous – the RB19 has ruled this season with a brutal but majestic tyranny.
At Suzuka on Sunday Red Bull will almost certainly seal the constructors’ championship. The mathematics for them not doing so are almost torturously unlikely. Scoring the same number of points here as secondplaced Mercedes and ensuring Ferrari do not outscore them by 24 points and the deed is done.
The team will likely have champagne on ice and celebratory T-shirts ready to be unboxed when the flag falls on Sunday. It will be their sixth constructors’ championship, their second in a row and achieved with almost unseemly superiority. In a 22race season they will have closed this out with six grands prix remaining.
Their rivals have been left reeling but it is an achievement admired and acknowledged across the paddock. Red Bull are operating at a remarkable level. Yes the car is, as Lewis Hamilton noted, a rocket ship but the team too have been hitting their marks operationally to such striking effect that there are well-oiled machines nervously glancing over their shoulders at the Red Bull operation.
The numbers tell their own story and it is a tale as relentless as the RB19 itself. Until the last round in Singapore, the only race Red Bull have not won this season, they have not only been dominant but, in Verstappen’s hands, been barely challenged. He has 12 wins from 15 races, teammate Sergio Pérez has two more wins. They have now been beaten only twice in the past 26 races and Verstappen has set a record in taking 10 consecutive wins this season.
Only Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz has managed to play Banquo’s ghost at this feast and only then in Singapore, where the Red Bull was out of sorts. Pointedly Verstappen brushed it off in Japan with the confidence of a man who knows just how good the car really is. “I mean, we stopped winning for one race. Shit happens,” he said. “We won 10 in a row before that …”
At Suzuka no such issues are expected and, indeed, in practice normal service was resumed. Verstappen topped the time sheets by more than a half a second in the first session and was similarly on top in the afternoon, three-tenths clear of Charles Leclerc, the Red Bull flying on this mighty circuit.
Of course success comes at a price. F1 insists the dominance is not offputting to the fans, that they appreciate it in the same way Tiger Woods worked magic on the numbers for golf during his peak and there may be some truth in that. Yet it’s hard to sell a totally dominant driver and team in F1 the same way one could sell Tiger chipping out of a bunker in the Open at Sandwich. But what is acknowledged and is inarguable is that F1 has long had similar periods of dominance.
Most notable and similar was McLaren’s run of 15 wins from 16 races with the mighty MP4/4 in 1988. But that is far from alone. Williams had similar success with Adrian Newey’s FW14B in 1992, while in 2004 Michael Schumacher took 12 wins from the first 13 races for Ferrari. Most recently Mercedes, at the beginning of the turbo-hybrid era, won 51 out of 59 races between 2014 and 2016.
This Red Bull is without doubt up there now with all of them, an achievement Verstappen admitted had not been on the radar when the season began. “I don’t think anyone expected that,” he said in Suzuka of the scale of dominance. “It’s a great achievement and something that we set out to do at the start of the year and something that everyone can be very proud of.”
While Verstappen cannot quite take the drivers’ title in Japan, he will likely all but close that deal, too. He leads Pérez by 151 points. To seal the championship at the next round in Qatar he would need to have an advantage of 146 points after that race.
A win here and that would be a formality. One he could conclude in the sprint race in Doha, the dampest possible squib to claim a title and one F1 might think long and hard on when planning future use of the format. A world champion crowned after a procession in a meaningless half-hour race, on a dreary circuit in front of a handful of fans, is certainly not what Verstappen’s superb driving or his equally impressive car has deserved this season.