F1 competition is great if not for Verstappen

The Formula 1 paddock is in general agreement that if not for Max Verstappen’s brilliance, the competition in F1 would be fantastic.

–by Mark Cipolloni–

F1 is not a spec series like IndyCar, which creates close competition. Each F1 team must design their own car each season, which inherently leads to more disparity.

F1 also has far fewer full course cautions that artificially bunch up the field, resulting in closer race finishes.

Outsiders jealous of F1’s huge global success claim F1 races are so boring now because Max Verstappen is winning everything – he has won 10 of the 12 races so far in 2023, and 2 of the 3 Sprint races.

Verstappen even wins all the wet races where is car is less a factor and driver talent comes to the fore.

They used to worship Ayrton Senna for his excellence in the rain. Verstappen is no less dominating in the wet.

Rather than recognizing and reveling in watching such a talented driver dominate his sport, the jealous ones prefer to throw darts.

But those inside the sport, understand what is really going on.

As Harry Benjamin put it on the BBC’s Checkered Flag podcast: “How much do we rate Verstappen because he’s almost unrateable, he’s through the roof. He’s almost actually ruining Formula One a little bit because of how good he is.”

Former Williams driver Aiken replied: “Yeah, it’s a debate that comes up every time we have these periods of domination. We’ve seen it before haven’t we, with Hamilton, with Schumacher, with Senna.

“It’s a little bit boring, dare I say. Yeah boring for the rest of us who are watching. We watch this because it’s a sport we love, we love to see the competition, the battles for the biggest prizes in motorsport, but we’re being robbed a little bit of that at the moment.

“But you have to take off your cap to how good a job not just Max is doing but Red Bull as well. They’re clearly building an extremely capable car and Max is clearly getting a lot out of it as you can see from the gulf of difference between him and Perez at the moment.

“So you have to have a level of respect for what they’re doing whilst I think it’s also okay to be annoyed that we’re not getting the battle that we all want at the front.”

George Russell recently summed it up: “Formula One would be so exciting if Max and Red Bull weren’t here at the moment.”

That was a sentiment echoed by his team boss Toto Wolff feels that if we ignore Red Bull’s Max Verstappen from the timesheets, we can say that the technical regulations work.

The new regulations were introduced in 2022 with the aim of making racing better and closing up the field. To make that happen, the regulations were very restrictive in nature, and we had a cost cap in place as well.

“Look at Albon and how good his performance is in qualifying. Aston Martin is coming back and McLaren is there too. That’s what we want.”

Referencing the level at which Max Verstappen is performing, Wolff added:

“He’s four tenths of a second faster than the top eight teams in a lap of about 90 seconds. So that’s not a big difference anymore. While everyone else is within two tenths. From P2 to P9, there’s two tenths of a second there between. That shows that the regulations work.”

Wolff said after Spa: “The second Red Bull is where we want to be. It would have been a fantastic season in that case with close racing!”