Bahrain GP
Saudi Arabian GP
As the 2023 season got underway in Bahrain with a Red Bull-Honda performance advantage apparently even greater than last year (when the team scored 17 victories from 22), so the pressure on the competition began to tell. The realisation at Mercedes and Ferrari that they had something fundamentally wrong in their organisations led to speculation of crisis at both teams.
Ferrari’s chief of performance engineering David Sanchez quit after Bahrain, with the possibility of others following him. Confronting the reality of a second successive mediocre car as he chases that elusive record-breaking eighth title, Lewis Hamilton, now 38, was deflated and untypically spoke out against Mercedes.
That’s how soul-destroying Max Verstappen’s Bahrain victory was. It wasn’t so much that he was over half a minute clear of the nearest non-Red Bull (Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin), it was how much bigger it could have been if he’d let himself off the leash. His engineer Gianpiero Lambiase was almost pleading with him to slow by 0.7sec per lap, even at a pace Verstappen considered comfortable. He eventually complied, yet still won with such an impressive margin.
“The gap is greater than last year,” said Hamilton, uninterested in varnishing the
truth. “It’s not on the straights – last year we were very draggy with a much bigger wing, but equalling in the corners; this year it’s mostly corners. They have a lot of rear end on the exits through most of the corners. In the race they weren’t pushing. They’re a lot quicker than they even seemed. We’ve got them potentially 1.5sec faster in the race per lap.”
