'No-one is going to catch Max this year'

[CharlieH]

 

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff painted a bleak but realistic picture of the Formula 1 season after the Japanese Grand Prix.

"No-one is going to catch Max this year," he said, following Max Verstappen's success at Suzuka.

"His driving and the car are just spectacular. You can see it by the way he manages the tyres. This season is [about] best of the rest. That is the fight that is on."

It was not exactly news. Verstappen's win on Sunday was exactly what was expected, and exactly what he achieved in two of the three races preceding it. And may well have done in the other had a brake problem not eased a path to victory for Ferrari's Carlos Sainz in Australia two weeks before.

Still, for a person with pretensions of being a rival for Red Bull, Wolff's was a pretty bleak assessment after the fourth race, getting on for the quarter-way point of the championship.

Most of Verstappen's rivals expected this season to be like this, if perhaps not quite to such an extent. After all, the Dutchman and Red Bull have dominated F1 since about the halfway point of the 2022 season, when a brief challenge from Ferrari at the start of a new regulation set finally expired in a bonfire of strategy errors and reliability failings.

 

• How Japanese Grand Prix unfolded

• Verstappen wins in Japan after crash delay

'Maybe other teams can win at some tracks'

Verstappen went into this season on the back of the most dominant year in F1 history. It simply doesn't happen in F1 that one team and driver have such an advantage one year and don't retain at least some form of edge into the following one as well. So predictions of a close season were thin on the ground over the winter.

 

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