BAHRAIN — Max Verstappen and his Red Bull team will leave Formula One’s preseason test feeling confident they can sweep all challengers again in 2024.
At the end of running on Friday’s final day, it was Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, not Verstappen, top of the order, but all the chatter this week has centered on the reigning world champions.
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While things look closer on the surface when looking only at headline times, especially from Thursday and Friday’s running, it is rare for rival teams to be so downbeat of their chances of challenging the lead team coming out of the tests.
Red Bull’s overall pace across three days of testing prompted Fernando Alonso to say he and 18 other drivers already know Verstappen will be champion again this year.
Rivals estimate Red Bull could be as far as half a second per lap quicker than the rest (a comfortable advantage in modern F1), although that may well change circuit to circuit as the season goes on.
Verstappen won last year’s final race, the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, by 17 seconds. His average victory margin across the year in races which finished under racing conditions was a hefty 13.363 seconds.
Those stats help underline why half a second per lap is a sizable margin for any team to overcome, especially with Red Bull likely to aggressively develop their RB20 car, which features a completely overhauled design concept to the record-shattering RB19 of last year.
Verstappen has won three straight drivers’ championships, and Red Bull won the constructors’ title in 2022 and 2023.
Last year was one of the most dominant seasons in F1 history — Verstappen won a record 18 races as Red Bull won 21 times out of 22 events through the year.
In truth, the competitive order is never known until the first qualifying session for the first race — when teams truly show the raw pace of their cars with low fuel and fresh tyres — but Verstappen has already declared his team has made a step forward from last year.
That first qualifying session takes place in a week’s time at the same venue as testing on March 1, ahead of the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix on March 2.
At testing last year, Aston Martin created headlines after emerging as a shock outside contender to Red Bull, but this time around it appears to be firmly in a busy chasing pack with Ferrari, McLaren and…
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