Red Bull may have locked out the front row of the grid for the Japanese Grand Prix but the competition is getting closer.
Max Verstappen had 0.292 seconds in hand over the next-fastest car at Suzuka. Six months ago, when F1 last raced at this track, the gap was almost exactly twice that.
On both occasions Red Bull’s closest rival was McLaren. Lando Norris, who will line up closest to the Red Bulls tomorrow, pointed out why that bodes particularly well for their team.
“Two tenths is not far away,” he said. “If we look back to where we were last year we were even further away, I think five tenths off pole.
“And this is the first track we’ve come back to where we had our upgrades last season. So I think it’s our best comparison of how we’ve improved over the winter and we’re quite a bit closer. That’s a very good sign.”
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Every one of Red Bull’s nine rival teams can boast they’ve cut into their lead between the two most recent Japanese grands prix. It helped matters that all 10 teams still had at least one car in qualifying after Q1, and therefore were all able to benefit from track evolution.
They were also aided by a minor error by Verstappen during his final lap in Q3. His tyres were beginning to fade by the end of the lap and he admitted he didn’t tackle the chicane as successfully as he intended. His pole position time was therefore six hundredths of a second off his theoretical best.
But every team besides Alpine closed on Red Bull by more than that. Aston Martin made the largest leap at all, having endured a poor weekend at Suzuka last year when they were grappling with set-up problems. Fernando Alonso reckoned they couldn’t have done better than fifth, though he was only four-thousandths of a second away from beating Carlos Sainz Jnr to fourth.
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Three other teams have improved their lap times by over a second in less than half a year: Sauber, Haas and Mercedes. The latter is an interesting case, as although their best starting position is no better than it was a year ago, Lewis Hamilton is clearly very pleased with his car’s balance this weekend.
Team principal Toto Wolff saw the glass half full after a session in which Hamilton was a mere 0.085 seconds away from a second-row start.
“The headline result of P7 and P9 is not great,” he admitted….
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