There are skeptics and then there are those who believe that Max Verstappen has only won the three Formula 1 world champion titles that appear on his service record because he drives a Red Bull. That argument is true, but only partially, and to realize this it is enough to compare the numbers of the current champion with those of Checo Pérez, his partner in the red buffalo garage. While the Dutchman has won seven of the ten races that have been held so far and in all the sprint (three), the Mexican has not won since last year (Baku), where, precisely, he celebrated his only victory in a short event. With the Jalisco rider out of focus—he is fifth in the points table, with almost half the loot of his workshop neighbor—Verstappen no longer sweeps away as he did the last two years, riding in one of the most competitive cars. dominant in the history of the contest. What happens is that the boy from Hasselt has had his work cut out because the RB20, the car projected by Red Bull for 2024, has lost its untouchable status. The new sensation is the MCL38, the bet with which McLaren begins to resemble the legendary team that it was, the one that throughout its almost six decades of life has been able to accumulate 12 drivers’ titles and eight constructors’ titles.
In Austria, where this Sunday (3:00 p.m., Dazn) the eleventh stop of the calendar will take place, Verstappen dressed as a superhero to contain the hugs of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri in the third short test of the course, in which he again It is clear that the papaya car is going like a shot, and that the British team is at the level of the best (Red Bull) when it comes to revitalizing the prototype, which this weekend has a new front wing. If Norris and Piastri didn’t take that half victory It was because of the immeasurable level of Mad Max, who knows how to win and knows how to suffer when the road gets steep. After defending the position like a wild boar against the attacks of the McLaren pair, Verstappen took another step in the qualifying session to add his eighth pole of the season, with a margin of four tenths, enormous, given that it is such a short route (4.3 kilometers). Next to him, Norris will start again, while Carlos Sainz will be fourth and Fernando Alonso, 15th. “Max is in another dimension,” was the phrase most repeated by the general leader’s rivals. The eighth place that Pérez will occupy, who has the same weapons as the holder of the pole once again highlights the level of excellence of Red Bull’s main claim.
Verstappen’s path to a fourth title is slightly complicated. The unexpected guest is McLaren, a structure that has managed to reinvent itself in recent years, and which appears to be one of the cleanest of all. Under the baton of Zak Brown, a racing enthusiast who triumphed in the business world, mainly in the field of sports marketing, the third most successful team in the championship is emerging strongly from a crisis that was on the verge of taking it down, and which even led it to have to sell (2021) the Technology Center, its headquarters and the jewel in the crown, for 197 million euros, even though it remains there on a rental basis. Thanks to the order imposed by Brown, with painful decisions such as layoffs, a direct consequence of the arrival of the budget cap, McLaren has been revitalised internally and that has had a direct influence on its car, which since 2012 had to wait almost a decade to win again (Ricciardo, in Monza 2021). The victory a couple of months ago in Miami (Norris) confirmed that the company has found a powerful car in its belly (Mercedes) and that it is already the best of all in the slow corners.
“I don’t see any weak points in McLaren,” Sainz said last week from Montmeló. There, McLaren literally rose from the ashes after the tremendous scare on Saturday. A short circuit in the false ceiling of the kitchen of the corporate pavilion caused a fire that forced the emergency services to intervene quickly. Obviously, this type of accident is never welcome, but even less so in the first race of a triple. Despite the misfortune, the Woking team was just two seconds away from ecstasy, a trifle if we take into account that a year earlier, Verstappen crossed the finish line with a 24-second advantage over the second (Hamilton).
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