Miami Grand Prix: Max Verstappen’s victory confirms his superiority over Sergio Perez

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Written by Miami Formula 1 writer Andrew Benson

1 hour ago

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Max Verstappen’s victory was his 38th in Formula 1

Max Verstappen arrived at the Miami Grand Prix determined to make up for his defeat in Azerbaijan last weekend, and left after making an emphatic statement about outperforming Red Bull teammate Sergio Perez.

By contrast, the Mexican started the weekend in Florida confident he could keep up with an unexpected title challenge against Verstappen for the entire season. He finished the race in chastise, unable to explain how his teammate had shown such an overwhelming advantage.

This was a statement victory for Verstappen, who won from ninth on the grid with an ease almost disdainful.

It wasn’t so much that the Dutchman was able to break through the field with ease after a tough qualifying session; This was what he did to Perez in the process.

It only took Verstappen 14 laps to ease his way into second place. Perez needed to use those early laps to extend the advantage, but he was only 3.3 seconds ahead when Verstappen passed Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin.

Perez actually said that he “knew the race was looking tough.” And when he couldn’t close in on Verstappen, after his podium stop, despite having 20 laps fresher tyres, he knew it was over.

Remarkably, by the time Verstappen made his pit stop with 12 laps to go, he was extending his advantage over Perez. He was only a second behind and was overtaking and went no more than a lap away.

It was, in the words of Red Bull team principal Christian Horner, “an absolutely fantastic performance”.

Verstappen produces Champion campaign

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Sergio Perez won both the race and the Grand Prix in Azerbaijan last weekend but had no answer for Max Verstappen in Miami.

It was a statement from Verstappen, who was badly beaten by Perez on the streets of Baku last weekend.

“He walked out of Baku disappointed,” Horner said. “Checo was the fastest guy out there, especially on Sunday, and Max has come here really wanting to reassert himself.”

Verstappen was amazing in Miami from the start, just 0.5 seconds or so faster than Perez. But things derailed briefly in qualifying on Saturday.

Verstappen made a mistake on his first lap in the final session and miscarried. And when Charles Leclerc crashed his Ferrari after going out early in the final laps, that was the session. Verstappen will take ninth place.

At the time, I felt like he had given Perez a gift. As it turns out, he simply provided Verstappen with an opportunity to prove his superiority.

Perez was struggling with the medium tires in the opening stint, saying they felt “very shaky”. But it was hardly faster than Alonso’s second-place Aston Martin, a much slower car, even if it was being driven by a superstar driver doing another stellar race.

Either Perez was being too careful, or he was just too hard on his tyres. Whatever the case, he failed to build the feature he needed. Then, seeing Verstappen behind him before the pit stops, sealed his fate by pressing hard too early on his second stint and cooking his tyres.

“Max deserves to win,” he said. “It was the most powerful car out there. I have to understand what went wrong. It’s really simple. When you don’t have the racing speed it’s really hard to win the race.”

Verstappen’s win did it all. He was much faster than Perez. He took much better care of his tires, despite his speed advantage coming from the high speed section through turns two through six. And he was driving smarter.

It was champion motivation, one that suggested Perez’s title challenge would turn into the illusion most F1 players had always expected.

The only negative point of the day was that he was booed during the razzmatazz, showbiz buildup to the race, when the drivers were introduced to the crowd one by one by LL Cool J, and onto the podium. Verstappen shrugged it off.

“If I was driving in the back, no one would do anything in terms of reaction,” he said. “It’s normal that you win and they don’t like who wins. That’s good for me. I have to be on top.” [of the podium]. I take the cup home and they go home and can have a nice evening.”

Wolff warns there is no quick fix for Mercedes despite the upgrades

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George Russell is sixth in the drivers’ standings with 40 points, 79 points off the championship lead

Red Bull’s performance confirmed their superiority this season. It was his fourth one or two in five races, and the only reason he didn’t have a full house is because Perez had a tough Saturday in Australia last month and started racing last.

Alonso, who is having a great season in the best team this year, hopes he wins this year’s race but accepts that it happens at Red Bull.

“Our main focus is to look back and keep Mercedes and Ferrari behind in the Constructors’ Championship,” he said. “We have to accept that Red Bull is ahead and doing better.”

He is a deserved third in the Drivers’ Championship and his team, Aston Martin, is second in the Constructors’ category. But they are only six points clear of Mercedes, whose drivers George Russell and Lewis Hamilton are fourth and sixth.

Mercedes hopes the next race at Imola in two weeks will mark the start of what Hamilton calls a “new course” as they deliver a major update that marks a change in design direction for their car.

The hope is that this will eventually catch Red Bull. But team boss Toto Wolff urges caution.

Wolff said: “We need to manage our own expectations, never in 15 years in F1 have I seen a silver bullet where 0.5 seconds of performance suddenly opens up. So I very much doubt that will happen here.

“What I’m looking for is for us to take some variables off the table where we think we could have brought something we don’t understand into the car. And to steer further into, let’s say, a stable platform. We’ll see where the foundation is and what we can do from there.”

“We’re chasing downforce and trying to do the best job we can in terms of the mechanical platform. We’re introducing a new chassis, a new floor, a new front suspension and that’s a very big operation, a major surgery, and so it’s going to be a lot of learning. In the virtual world it’s a good time.”

Hard times in the Alps

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Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly have scored just 14 points in five Alpine races this season

Elsewhere, there is the impression that changes are looming at Alpine’s senior management level.

The team started the season, after finishing fourth last year, with the goal of finishing in the top three. But they’ve had a tough time, and he’s sixth overall and scored just 14 points, even as Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon take home two points in Miami, with eighth and ninth-place tied for their best result of the year.

Before the race, CEO Laurent Rossi gave an interview to French television station Canal Plus in Miami that confirmed his unhappiness.

“We started this year with a deficit in performance on the one hand, and also with a deficit in implementation,” he said. “That’s a lot — and it shows. We are in a position that is not at all worth the resources invested, and we are far — far away — from the ultimate goal for this year.

“What I see is, certainly, there is a lack of performance, a lack of precision in execution, but also possibly a frame of mind that is not at the level of what the same team has accomplished in the past.”

He used the word “sycophancy” to describe the first race of the season, in which Oconon received three separate Grand Prix penalties as a result of a series of errors by the team and driver. He said: “The last race in Baku felt very similar to the race in Bahrain.

“The right to make mistakes, is a fundamental principle. Mistakes are what we learn. However, when you make the same mistakes twice, it means you haven’t learned and you don’t take responsibility. That’s not acceptable.”

The remarks appeared on Sunday morning and somewhat angered the team. What Rossi intended to achieve is not clear, but they are the kind of comments that tend to surface before someone loses their job, or at least herald major changes.

These are nervous times in the Alps.

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