In Jeddah, once Max Verstappen broke out of the midfield and had a clear run at his team mate, the potential of the Red Bull was there for all to see.
For lap after lap, the Red Bull pair produced lap times in the order of a second or more quicker than their rivals. Race leader Sergio Perez put 19 seconds on the team’s closest pursuer, Fernando Alonso, in 18 laps. Where was that performance advantage during yesterday’s Australian Grand Prix?
No doubt the scale of Red Bull’s superiority will vary to some degree from track to track. Nonetheless on outright one-lap pace in qualifying the story was little changed. Red Bull were quickest by 0.292s in Bahrain, 0.155s in Saudi Arabia (where Verstappen did not take part in Q3 due to a technical fault) and 0.236s in Australia.
Verstappen was certainly confident in the performance of his car, so much so that he admitted he didn’t feel the need to fight the Mercedes too hard when they came past him at the start. George Russell passed the pole-winner at turn one, then Lewis Hamilton demoted Verstappen at turn three.
“I was quite careful,” Verstappen admitted afterwards. “I could have been a little bit more aggressive. But on the other hand, I didn’t want to have any damage on my car, because I knew that we had a quick car, right? So even losing one or two spots was not the end of the world.”
It speaks volumes that Verstappen was so unbothered about being passed by two rivals at the start. The way the race unfolded, he seldom had to tap into the full potential of the Red Bull. Russell and Hamilton didn’t pull away from him: Indeed, the contest was warming up nicely when Alexander Albon crashed at turn six and caused the day’s first red flag.
That moved Russell out of the way. He liked Mercedes’ aggressive call to pit him under the resulting Safety Car, and it would have been fascinating to see how successful his bid to reach the end of the race on a set of hard tyres would have been. But the red flag took his advantage away and left Verstappen only needing to deal with one of the Mercedes.
He did so with ridiculous ease in the new, fourth DRS zone added for this year’s race as soon as drivers were allowed to open their rear wings. On that 12th lap he went over one-and-a-half seconds quicker than he did the previous time around. After that he was back into managing his pace:
2023 Australian Grand Prix lap times
All the lap times by the drivers (in…
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