Is Red Bull already unbeatable?

In Miami, for the fifth time this season, it was Red Bull who left with the victory trophy. Max Verstappen, starting 9th, continuously overtook his opponents to claim the 38th win of his career. Despite starting in pole position, Sergio Perez couldn’t offer any resistance against his teammate and had to settle for the position of the first of the losers. The closest pursuer of the Red Bulls, Fernando Alonso, finished 26 seconds behind the flying bulls, an abysmal gap that confirms the excellent form of the Austrian team at the beginning of the season.

The situation after Miami

Apart from in Australia, where the end of the race was transformed by a red flag and a late restart, no driver in 2023 has managed to finish within 20 seconds of the first Red Bull. It is also on the home turf of their third driver, Daniel Ricciardo, that the Milton Keynes team has not seen both of its drivers finish on the podium (with Perez finishing 5th, editor’s note). By collecting all the victories, 9 out of the possible 10 podiums, and the fastest lap points on 3 occasions, Red Bull currently has 224 points in the constructors’ championship. With a lead of over 100 points on their closest rival Aston Martin, it would take a catastrophe to break Red Bull’s current cycle and see the title slip away from them.

Indeed, while announcing Red Bull as the winner of the championship as early as the fifth race of the season may be considered premature, the statistics are on Christian Horner’s team’s side. Since the current points system was implemented, only 3 teams who were leading the standings after the fifth race did not end up with the trophy at the end of the season (McLaren in 2010, Red Bull in 2021, and Ferrari in 2022, editor’s note). Additionally, no team that had at least a total of 160 points at the same stage of the championship did not emerge as the winner at the end of the year. With 224 points, Red Bull is the Formula 1 team that has accumulated the most points after 5 races. The previous record was held by Mercedes in 2019.

Reasons for hope

If Red Bull has the highest number of points in history after the 5th round, it is notably due to the sprint race in Baku, which allowed Sergio Perez and Max Verstappen to bring an additional 8 and 6 points respectively to their team. Without these 14 bonus points, Red Bull’s total points would be 210. And it is precisely because of the sprint races and a calendar spanning 23 races that Red Bull’s rivals could make a comeback. This provides them with more opportunities to bring improvements and get closer to the Austrian giant. However, this is balanced by the budget cap, which prevents teams from spending too much money on developing their race car. It is unlikely that Ferrari or Mercedes will have the means and time to catch up with Red Bull this year. Their real chance will be mainly next season when Red Bull will be impacted by the limitation on their wind tunnel development time.

The real hope to save the suspense of this 2023 season is named Sergio Perez. If no rival team can beat Red Bull, it is within the team itself that the confrontation will have to take place. This rivalry between teammates had been one of the saving factors in seasons like 2014 or 2016, where, despite a highly dominant Mercedes, fans could rely on a thrilling duel between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg that brought suspense and adrenaline. The situation was very different in 2019 and 2020. Valtteri Bottas failed to be an obstacle to his garage neighbor’s championship titles.

Formula 1 fans in 2023 must therefore hope that Sergio Perez will be closer to the performance levels of a Nico Rosberg than a Valtteri Bottas. With only a 14-point gap between the two Red Bull drivers and 19 Grand Prix races remaining, the race for the driver’s championship is still wide open for these two guns. Moreover, in 2016, despite being 43 points behind Nico Rosberg, Lewis Hamilton ultimately finished as runner-up with just a 5-point deficit.

This long Formula 1 season can therefore either be thrilling in regards to the battle for the driver’s championship, or particularly tedious if Max Verstappen manages to tame Sergio Perez.