It’s ironic that in a season Red Bull Racing’s margin appears to have shrunk, even if only by a little bit, Max Verstappen can count on teammate Sergio Pérez backing him up in second.
Verstappen’s Japanese victory margin was reduced by a third year on year, but it was Sergio Pérez who was his closest challenger after a strong drive to seal the team’s third one-two finish of the season.
Remarkably that’s already halfway to last year’s six perfect results for the team.
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That in itself is notable, and it says more about Pérez than it does the team.
We’re only four rounds in, but the Mexican looks like a driver reborn in 2024.
He was so good this weekend that he was even briefly a match for Verstappen, sneaking to within 0.1 seconds of pole on Saturday afternoon.
His race was undone largely by some smalls struggles on his first set of medium tyres. It forced him into a minor battle to recover second place, albeit one he had no real trouble executing, including with some brave passes through the super fast 130R.
It’s a major turnaround for Pérez, who was in the thick of his nadir in Japan last season.
In 2023 he crashed twice — with Lewis Hamilton and Kevin Magnussen — twice breaking his front wing.
His race was going so badly that the team retired his car. He was then embarrassingly re-entered into the race to serve a five-second penalty for causing a collision, after which he was retired as second time.
It was around then that the rumours about his future with Red Bull Racing were most severe.
You wouldn’t recognise that Pérez on today’s grid.
“I think we are in a good momentum,” he said. “If you remember here last year, it was probably my worst weekend.
“If we’re strong in places like this …s I think we can be strong everywhere else.”
Whatever’s triggered the turnaround — whether it’s a new approach or whether he’s simply accepted he can’t beat Verstappen — it’s pulling his future with the team back into his grasp.
Team boss Christian Horner has always said it’s his seat to lose. He’s doing his best to win it.
FERRARI’S BIG STEP FORWARD
Not for the first time this year, Ferrari squeezed the maximum result from a grand prix.
Carlos Sainz continued his perfect podium streak this season for all races at which he doesn’t have appendicitis, while even Charles Leclerc, who was mystified to be so far off the pace in qualifying, executed perfectly to follow him home in fourth.
After what appeared to be a bit of a reality check for Ferrari in qualifying, when it was a long way behind Red Bull Racing and was pipped to third by Lando Norris, Sunday reaffirmed the Italian team’s place as the second-best team in the pack and RBR’s logical challenger.
Strange though it might seem to say on a day the team wasn’t in victory contention, this is a massively buoying race for Ferrari and its long-suffering fans for two reasons.
The first is that the car was competitive around this tyre-punishing circuit. It’s not just about pure pace but the fact that the car managed the rubber very well — so well in fact that Leclerc completed the race with just one pit stop.
That would have been unthinkable even as recently as last year, when the car had a debilitating habit of destroying its tyres.
The second is that the team was strategically on point — again, something you’d never have dreamt of saying in recent years.
Sainz’s podium was won because the team didn’t fall into the undercut trap set by Lando Norris. Norris twice made very early stops, which got the Briton track position but left him vulnerable late.
The Spaniard stuck to his guns and swept easily into third with plenty of time to spare.
Leclerc’s strategy was more impressive. The one-stop strategy was marginal and risky — just ask Mercedes, where both drivers were switched off the one-stop after showing race-ruining pace.
But again Ferrari stuck to what it knew its car was capable of. It rocketed Leclerc from eighth on the grid up to fourth, fending off the higher starting Norris easily.
Combined these elements are testament both to the team’s technical direction and to the sense of organisation brought about under Frédéric Vasseur’s leadership.
“[There’s] confidence that it’s much more calm on the pit wall,” Vasseur told Sky Sports. “The best way to make a good decision is when everything’s going together in the same direction.”
On the evidence of the first four races, that direction is the right one.
RICCIARDO UNLUCKY AS WILLIAMS BRACES FOR DAMAGE
This wasn’t the Japanese Grand Prix that Daniel Ricciardo needed.
Ricciardo qualified a reasonable 11th and just 0.055 seconds behind teammate Yuki Tsunoda despite having lost all of Friday practice.
Tsunoda went on to prove the RB car was capable of points, and Ricciardo’s race pace over the first three rounds suggested he would have been right in the battle with the sister car.
But he never had the chance to prove it, with a big first-lap crash putting paid to his afternoon — and to his latest chance to jump-start his season.
It was the sort of crash typical of a tight start on a narrow circuit — they don’t call the midfield the ‘carbon fibre zone’ for nothing — exacerbated by an unfortunate choice of starting tyre.
“Myself and Yuki had a pretty poor getaway on the medium, and all the cars behind on the soft just got us quite easily,” Ricciardo explained. “We were just scrabbling for some grip.
“I remember getting out of turn 2 with a little bit of a lack of traction I remember an Aston [Lance Stroll] on my left. I was kind of watching that car, and as I was staring to drift to open up turn 3 I felt Alex.
“He just had so much better drive out of turn 2. I don’t even know if he wanted to be there, but he could see me going a little bit sideways. Just everyone got choked up, and that was that. Unfortunately a short Sunday.”
Albon instinctively tried to capitalise on Ricciardo’s lap of grip, but it’s also hard to imagine a positive outcome from an around-the-outside move through turn 3. In that sense the Aussie can count himself unlucky to have been sprung by the Williams.
But the net situation is that Ricciardo still finds himself searching for a strong result to break his slow start to the season.
“I don’t look at today and think, ‘Oh, man this year when it rains it pours’,” he insisted, per Autosport. “It was just one of those things.
“I don’t look at it any more than today being a kind of singular incident.
“It would have been nice to get a race under our belt and try to show a little bit of something that I felt we were starting to show yesterday. We’ll do that in China.”
Spare a thought too, though, for Albon — or more specifically for his Williams team, which is down on spares but keeps having to repair huge crashes.
Albon’s latest smash follows his bingle in Melbourne and Logan Sargeant’s FP1 crash on Friday.
“The way the tyre [from the tyre wall] went under the car, it ripped the car, so the car went from a good lap speed to zero really quickly,” he said. “I’m just worried. I didn’t get a good look at it because of the tyres, but hopefully it’s okay. “
It could be another major setback for the team with just 12 days until track action in China.
TSUNODA CLAIMS POINTS IN LANCE STROLL CUP
Home favourite Yuki Tsunoda scored a precious point for 10th, becoming the first Japanese driver to score points at their home grand prix since Kamui Kobayashi in 2012.
It was an assured drive of the kind we’ve come to expect from the fourth-year driver as he establishes himself as worthy of an extended stay in Formula 1.
It was also a brutal reminder of the gap between the top five teams and the rest.
Suzuka Circuit was originally designed as a test track. It’s extremely demanding on the cars, particularly aerodynamically, the key performance differentiator in modern Formula 1.
Tsunoda finished 10th but 48 seconds behind the frontrunning pack tailed by Lewis Hamilton in ninth.
Some of that is down to different strategies, but the fundamental truth is that Tsunoda’s RB was never in contention for more than 10th.
In fact Tsunoda should never have been in contention for 10th at all, with all 10 frontrunners taking the flag.
It was only thanks to Lance Stroll that the single point was up for grabs.
After an inexplicably poor qualifying result on Saturday, Stroll was again anonymous on Sunday.
While Fernando Alonso finished sixth, ahead of both Mercedes drivers, Stroll toiled out of the points all afternoon.
He was even given a set of soft tyres at his final stint to chase down Tsunoda, who the team said over radio was “no threat” to his race.
But he couldn’t close the gap. He finished a lapped 12th, losing a place to Nico Hülkenberg on the last lap.
To be fair to the Canadian, the rapid and narrow Suzuka track is one of the most punishing on lap time when you’re battling or stuck in traffic. That in part explains the deficit.
But the points tell the story. Alonso beat both Mercedes drivers but Aston Martin only equalled Mercedes’s score, leaving the team fifth in the constructors standings.
The race probably won’t be indicative of Stroll’s season, but it won’t take much of these characteristic odd poor performances to really hurt the team.
PIASTRI’S QUIET GAINS
“Not the afternoon we were looking for,” is how Oscar Piastri summed up the follow-up to his maiden podium.
Ironically, though, this was arguably a better performance in context than his third place at the same circuit last year.
Last season he earnt his plaudits for exploiting what was comfortably the second-quickest car at Suzuka while suffering massive tyre degradation.
This year, particularly in the race, the McLaren was only in the mix with Mercedes and Aston Martin, with Ferrari well ahead.
The comparison to teammate Norris was more flattering too despite being an almost identical 17 seconds.
Last year that gap to Norris was a reflection of pure pace. This year the margin was down to Piastri having to battle through the pack, including a never-ending final stint stuck behind Fernando Alonso.
His battle with George Russell was also costly, forcing him to cut the final chicane after contact and then losing seventh place to the Briton on the final lap.
Both he and Russell — and their teams — agreed in a post-race stewards investigation that the bump off the track didn’t warrant a penalty, not least because Piastri held the place in the aftermath.
The disappointment in Piastri’s race was simply that McLaren didn’t have the pace the team expected in the race. Partly this will have been down to the lack of practice time to either hone the car or to realise its true pace.
The Aussie still has work to do to match Norris in race trim at these most extreme circuits, but he’s still well on his way after Japan.
Merc attacks Piastri in late race drama | 00:50
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