Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff painted a bleak but realistic picture of the Formula 1 season after the Japanese Grand Prix.”No-one is going to catch Max this year,” he said, following Max Verstappen’s success at Suzuka.”His driving and the car are just spectacular. You can see it by the way he manages the tyres. This season is [about] best of the rest. That is the fight that is on.”
It was not exactly news. Verstappen’s win on Sunday was exactly what was expected, and exactly what he achieved in two of the three races preceding it. And may well have done in the other had a brake problem not eased a path to victory for Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz in Australia two weeks before.Still, for a person with pretensions of being a rival for Red Bull, Wolff’s was a pretty bleak assessment after the fourth race, getting on for the quarter-way point of the championship.Most of Verstappen’s rivals expected this season to be like this, if perhaps not quite to such an extent. After all, the Dutchman and Red Bull have dominated F1 since about the halfway point of the 2022 season, when a brief challenge from Ferrari at the start of a new regulation set finally expired in a bonfire of strategy errors and reliability failings.
How Japanese Grand Prix unfolded
Verstappen wins in Japan after crash delay
‘Maybe other teams can win at some tracks’
Verstappen went into this season on the back of the most dominant year in F1 history. It simply doesn’t happen in F1 that one team and driver have such an advantage one year and don’t retain at least some form of edge into the following one as well. So predictions of a close season were thin on the ground over the winter.There was, though, some hope that Red Bull’s rivals might catch up. So far, although the chasing pack has moved around a bit, that has not really materialised. But both Verstappen and the team that has become his closest rivals this year – Ferrari – believe that it still might yet.”Melbourne felt like a bit of a hiccup,” said Verstappen. “But what we did today, that’s what we want to do, and that’s what we aim to do every single weekend.”It’s still a very long season. I don’t want to think about the rest of the season too much. I really want to approach it race by race.”I know there will be tracks coming up that might not be so favourable for us. When we do get to tracks where we know that we can be quick, we have to really take advantage of it and score the maximum amount of points as a team, and that’s what we’ll continue to try and do.”And then, of course, I think we know that we get to tracks where maybe it’s a bit more difficult we have to try and maximise that as well, where maybe other teams can win as well.”Where could those tracks be? After Red Bull’s struggles in Singapore last year – the only time they were beaten in all of 2023 – Verstappen has his ideas.
“Looking at the history so far, street circuits are in general a little bit more difficult for us,” he added. “I do think that our car has improved a bit, you know, in the low speed.”But of course, on a street circuit, it’s not only low speed, it’s drivability, it’s kerb riding, riding over the bumps. So general ride of a car. So these things are still a little bit unknown at the moment of how well we have improved on that.”
