Why Verstappen's China F1 win was a sideshow to the real battle

Much has changed in Formula 1’s landscape since the championship last arrived on Chinese shores in 2019. The long-awaited end to that hiatus, extended by the lingering effects of COVID-19 restrictions enforced in China, offered a fitting period of introspection to consider how F1 has moved on since. Very different cars aerodynamically now grace the field, while F1’s last visit also coincided with the start of its modern-day boom and entrance into the cultural zeitgeist, rather than sitting on the fringes as a niche sporting discipline.

Empires have fallen and risen in that five-year span. The Lewis Hamilton-led Mercedes hegemony feels like a distant memory, compared to the contemporary dominance of Max Verstappen and Red Bull. Case in point: Verstappen had never won the Chinese Grand Prix before this season; his machinery in the previous seasons never really anything better than the third-best car on the grid at that point. In today’s context, it’s really no surprise that he managed to end that barren spell this season.

Nor is it a surprise that he did so with a lead that bordered on the unassailable, even when considering the impact that two safety car periods delivered upon his advantage. Getting a better start than team-mate Sergio Perez probably did about 90% of the work, and those hoping for a first-lap contretemps between them (purely in the hope of pitching their magazine editors a “Bulls in a China strop” headline) were left with a sense of disappointment. There’s always next year.

Perez not only failed to find parity with Verstappen into the first corner, but also found Fernando Alonso cruising around the outside with great momentum. The Spaniard scampered from his third-place grid slot like a scalded cat and immediately attempted to disrupt Red Bull, and getting between Verstappen and Perez helped the former and hindered the latter.

But that wasn’t the defining factor in Verstappen’s win; one might argue that turning up to the track on race day was more than sufficient. Facetiousness aside, there were several aspects to consider as expected challengers faltered and those considered out for the count had flattered, owing to the conditions prevalent around the Shanghai circuit. It severely hampered any iota of a challenge for victory, but it added handfuls of spice to the battle for the other podium positions.

In the lead-up to the weekend, Ferrari had been touted as a challenger to Red Bull in Shanghai. It was expected that, on a lower-grip surface and with temperatures not expected to push the mercury too high, the front-limited nature of the circuit would start to instigate graining as the tyres began to slide laterally across the asphalt. What nobody knew was that the circuit had been slathered with a bitumen paint; and it wasn’t until the teams and drivers arrived that they noticed a darker hue to the track.

It didn’t exactly offer bountiful grip, and during the wet sprint qualifying was actually rather slippery. However, it reduced the roughness of the road enough to ensure the tyres weren’t being mechanically worn away at too much, nullifying the effect of graining entirely. Thus, Ferrari found itself further back than perhaps much of the paddock had anticipated.

Verstappen bolted clear at the start, but the real battle was behind him

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Aston Martin, in the meantime, dazzled in qualifying through Alonso’s efforts and had now earned vital track position. Unlike 2023, its form has reversed and thus the AMR24 is perhaps less effective on Sundays relative to its one-lap pace. The veteran Spaniard had pressed his early charge into action but, at the end of the opening lap, Verstappen was already 1.6 seconds up the road and dropping the field.

“[In the sprint race, it was] the same with Lewis, I was P2 when Lando went off and I said, ‘OK, I may try to lead the race for at least one lap’,” Alonso revealed. “Today, I passed Checo and thought, ‘OK, I will do it again’ but I had no choice or opportunity. Hopefully one day soon.

“The wind direction changed this morning so in Turns 1 and 2 it was a headwind. So I knew that if I was parallel to someone in Turns 1 and 2, I had the opportunity to attack. So I was very aggressive.”

Given Perez’s deficit to Verstappen, both McLaren and Ferrari sensed blood in the water and began to circle

Even if one could charitably suggest that Alonso’s early interloping had restricted Perez’s pace in the early phases of the race, the Mexican did not find speed to reverse the arrears once he passed the two-time world champion on the fifth lap. In the first stint, Perez was losing around 0.6s to 0.7s per lap compared to his team-mate on average. At the point where they both pitted on lap 13, the gap was thus that Red Bull could double stack without any fear of repercussions: 9.6s separated Verstappen and Perez.

Red Bull was committed to a two-stop strategy; it had used a medium compound and had two sets of hards to see out the rest of the 56-lap GP. But it appeared that, given Perez’s deficit to Verstappen, both McLaren and Ferrari sensed blood in the water and began to circle.

Alonso was already ceasing to be a factor, as the man himself had predicted prior to the race, and Lando Norris had put a move on him on the seventh lap to firmly place McLaren in the podium hunt.

A podium was already up for grabs, then, but could Perez be beaten for the runner-up step on the rostrum? Both Red Bulls found themselves in traffic owing to their early stop but, given the RB20’s obvious superiority, it was surely a simple enough job to steal past those in the top six sporting worn medium tyres. For Verstappen, that duly proved to be the case and he got past Charles Leclerc and then race leader Norris as the two were already considering defecting to one-stop strategies – in Ferrari parlance, this was relayed to Leclerc as “Plan D”. The Monegasque found wear on the medium tyres to be lower than expected, so felt enfranchised enough to comply.

Leclerc and Norris made the one-stop strategy work, but were powerless to prevent Verstappen regaining the lead

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Perez had to get past Carlos Sainz, which he managed moments before the Ferrari driver made his own stop at the end of lap 17, but was over 10s behind Norris – albeit catching the Briton thanks to the tyre offset between them; Norris and Leclerc both continued to go long on their opening sets of tyres.

A virtual safety car was manna from heaven at that point, emerging when Valtteri Bottas’ Sauber ground to a halt on lap 20 as its Ferrari power unit popped its clogs. Norris had mentally anticipated it, but it did not take effect until he had rounded the final corner on his 21st lap; a sweary tirade unfurled from within his neon yellow crash helmet as he was convinced he’d missed the boat. Leclerc took the opportunity to pit for hard tyres, but Norris earned a reprieve as the stranded Sauber was stuck in gear, extending the yellow-flag period further.

“I knew it; it was obvious it was going to be a VSC,” Norris reflected. “But it just didn't come out. So I was saying to myself, ‘I bet it's going to come out as soon as I go around the last corner’, and it literally did! Even my engineer said it, I said it to him. Luckily, it stayed out a long time and then it obviously went to safety car.”

Norris thus pitted on the next lap and stayed ahead of Leclerc, before the VSC was upgraded to a physical safety car. Knowing that Verstappen’s considerable lead was about to be wiped out, Red Bull performed another double-stack manoeuvre before catching the Mercedes-AMG GT safety car. This locked in Verstappen’s lead but, for Perez, his earlier deficit allied to the reduced penalty of VSC pitstops meant that he’d shaken out in fourth behind Norris and Leclerc.

“It took a long time, I found, to get the first car cleared,” Verstappen reckoned while trundling behind the safety car, attempting to chivvy Bernd Maylander along with the positioning of his Red Bull. “I felt like we drove one more lap behind the safety car for nothing…”

It eventually retreated to the pitlane at the end of the 26th lap, but hell rather broke loose in the midfield upon the restart as Verstappen compressed the field through Turn 14. Running sixth Alonso misjudged his braking slightly and caused George Russell and Oscar Piastri to check up. Daniel Ricciardo just about caught the brake pedal but could do little about his nudge to Piastri’s rear, where he caused minor lacerations to his countryman’s floor.

Stroll’s effort to avoid contact was significantly less obvious, apparently focusing more on the corner apex than on the RB ahead of him. The Aston Martin went into the back of Ricciardo’s car and wiped out almost half of the diffuser, leaving sprinklings of debris at the corner. When green flag running resumed, Kevin Magnussen’s clumsy attempt to pass Yuki Tsunoda caused terminal damage to the second RB, which needed a clean-up effort to extract from the circuit. The safety car subsequently emerged once again.

The first safety car restart was a mess as Stroll and Ricciardo clashed before Magnussen's swipe into Tsunoda caused the second safety car

Photo by: Mark Sutton

Verstappen had dropped the pack and crossed the start/finish line on the lap 27 restart almost a second clear of Norris, and would have to go through the same rigamarole while Tsunoda’s car was being packed up. The second restart, this time on lap 32, was much cleaner and Verstappen repeated the same procedure; at the end of that lap, he’d already broken clear of the DRS range to Norris.

There was no competition for first place, but plenty for second. Norris had the benefit of Leclerc keeping Perez honest, and didn’t need to sink energy or tyre life into a tete-a-tete battle while the field was still tight. His pace remained strong and, in the following laps, maintained a deficit of between 0.3 to 0.6s per lap to Verstappen in his first racing laps on the hard compound.

In the meantime, Perez struggled to breach Leclerc’s defences and was losing more and more time to the cars ahead. It took the Guadalajara-born driver eight laps to make his move into Turn 6, with the next objective to reclaim second from Norris, but he’d already used up a chunk of the hard tyres’ vitality in the battle over third.

Perez was 5.6s behind Norris at this juncture, although a poor final sector from Norris helped bring this down to 4.1s at the end of lap 42. That should have been the incentive Perez needed to further whittle away at the arrears, but Norris instead responded and proceeded to reinstate a five-second-plus margin over the following tours to fortify his position.

"It's a bit strange, because the strength of this car since the beginning of the year is it's very solid in all conditions with all tyres. Today is a bit an outlier because as soon as we put on the hards, we were half a second off" Charles Leclerc

“At that point the gap was already quite big and, given how good his pace was on the first stint in terms of degradation, I knew it was going to be close,” Perez recalled of his game of wits with Norris. “But once we basically had the same pace, and once you go by the car ahead and you start fighting for… I don't know how many laps we ended up fighting between Charles and myself, but it's really game over. You use so much of your tyre. You put so much energy into them that they never really come back.”

Norris and Perez were, effectively, in lock-step over the final 15 laps. Their lap time traces, following that iffy 42nd lap from Norris, effectively overlap with a slight advantage in the McLaren driver’s favour in the general effort to rebuild that gap. Perez was resigned to scoring third place.

“We were on a reasonably aggressive two-stop, which was the fastest race, and it looked like Lando and Charles had committed to a one-stop,” explained Red Bull team boss Christian Horner. “And then the safety car came out at just the wrong time. We effectively had to convert to go on to the same strategy as them for the second half of the race, which cost Checo track position.”

Perez squeezed the juice out of his tyres fighting Leclerc and was left without enough performance to reel in Norris

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

It’s a nice sentiment from Horner, but Perez’s opening stint put him in that position; had he reduced his deficit by half and started chalking up laps around 0.3-0.4s off Verstappen’s pace, there might not have been such a convenient gap for Norris to drop into.

Verstappen’s final margin of victory over Norris stood at 13.773s. It effectively matched that of his sprint race domination, although the championship leader reckoned that post-sprint tinkering offered “an improvement compared to the sprint race. It just made my life a bit easier.”

McLaren shared Norris’s surprise that it had been able to chalk up a podium on a circuit it expected to struggle at. Citing deficiencies in low-speed corners and the longer-radius turns, two particularly prevalent corning profiles at the Shanghai venue, McLaren admitted that it expected a weekend of “damage limitation” rather than splitting the Red Bulls at the flag. Team principal Andrea Stella reckoned that McLaren had benefited from the overcast conditions, explaining “the fact that there was no sunshine helped keep the rear tyres under control”, and this strengthened Norris’s management of tyres in clean air.

Leclerc had attempted to exploit that gap between the Red Bulls too, but Ferrari comparatively struggled during the second phase of the race. Had graining been a factor, Ferrari can contend with this much more easily owing to its compliance and new-found confidence in tyre management. That didn’t come to pass, and instead both Leclerc and Sainz experienced difficulties in getting the SF-24 to mesh with the hard tyres.

“It's a bit strange, because the strength of this car since the beginning of the year is it's very solid in all conditions with all tyres,” Leclerc said. “Today is a bit an outlier because as soon as we put on the hards, we were half a second off.”

Sainz had the tougher task of the two Prancing Horse jockeys and had stopped four laps before the VSC; thus, he had to carry his hard tyres for 39 laps. Team principal Fred Vasseur even suggested that the Spaniard had been “too conservative” at the start of the stint and “was a bit scared to do a very long stint”, but praised his efforts nonetheless.

Ferrari's strategy was undone by letting Russell ahead as Sainz and Leclerc squabbled at Turn 1

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

It was in losing positions at the start that Vasseur reckoned was the biggest compromise, as the Ferraris let Russell trickle through in the opening corners. Russell provided some degree of adversarial needle to Sainz on the final stint, but the Ferrari driver had enough in the bag to let the Briton’s challenge subside.

Regardless, Ferrari had not been the thorn in Red Bull’s side as predicted; suggestions were that the current cars and the resurfaced asphalt had ensured that the Chinese circuit was far less front-limited than it had been in the past, thus linking Ferrari to a victory challenge proved folly.

McLaren has upgrades planned for its trip to Florida – given it beat one Red Bull in China, what chance it can beat the other?

So it goes that Verstappen barely faced a single threat in a weekend where he showed devastating control over the rest of the field. Fourth on the grid in the sprint could not derail him, and leading from pole in the full-fat grand prix left him to do naught but shadowboxing at the front of the order.

Given Red Bull’s potency in Miami on the evidence of the two races held there, his dominance is very much set to continue at the start of next month. McLaren, however, has upgrades planned for its trip to Florida – given it beat one Red Bull in China, what chance it can beat the other? Norris reckons he can feel a win brewing, but Miami might be a trifle too early for the papaya team.

Norris feels McLaren can win a race this year, but it will need to stop the might of Red Bull and Verstappen to do so

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images