Max Verstappen Still Too Good

It’s that time of the year once again.

With the 2023 season now behind us, all that’s left is to hand out some awards. It wasn’t clear what the upcoming season had in store when we put out our 2022 awards, but now it’s coming in crystal. Red Bull Racing absolutely dominated the year.

21 of 22 races were won by Red Bull, with 19 of them won by the reigning drivers champion alone. There’s no use in delaying the inevitable any further, it’s time to start with the obvious:

Michael Schumacher Award for Most Outstanding Driver and Ayrton Senna Award for Best Qualifier: Max Verstappen

There’s really not much else to say about Verstappen’s season that hasn’t at this point. As a personal aside, by October, it started to become really hard to write some of those “Verstappen Wins ___” headlines without directly repeating myself from the week prior. Verstappen was near untouchable for the entire season.

There are all sorts of wild stats coming out of this year when it comes to Red Bull. Laps led, in which Verstappen became the first driver to cross the 1,000 mark in a season, was absolutely dominated by the Bulls. Only 176 laps were led by non-Red Bull drivers in the entire season, 114 without counting the lone race in which they didn’t win.

Said race, Singapore, still ended with Verstappen catching fire in the closing laps and finishing fourth. While this denied him the feat of being just the second F1 driver in history to finish on the podium in every single race in a season, it still illustrates just how impossible it was to shake Verstappen in any race this season.

Verstappen was also able to score 12 poles and walk away with the best qualifier award. He’s not the best qualifier in the field, that honor likely belongs to Charles Leclerc. But he’s still pretty great at dealing with the task, and was in a much better car, and thus was able to beat Leclerc in average starts fairly easily.

Alain Prost Award for Most Valuable Driver: Alexander Albon

Verstappen has a case for this, in that Red Bull would have finished a lowly fourth in the constructor standings without him.

But, at the same time, Albon scored 27 of Williams’s 28 points on the season. The Thai driver held a perfect qualifying record against rookie teammate Logan Sargeant and also pretty decisively beat him in races head-to-head.

Albon has a decision to make next year as to what his future holds. He probably could land a top seat at a…