A record-breaking number of races and a record-breaking driver. Mark Hughesexplains how it all happened in 2023
FORMULA 1 SEASON REVIEW
Given that the championship had been wrapped up almost two months earlier, there was little tension around the Abu Dhabi season finale. But there was a second place in the constructors’ championship to be decided between Mercedes and Ferrari. They arrived here separated by four points, with a potential 44 up for grabs. But those 44 points (26 for a win and fastest lap, 18 for second) were very much in the reaches of fantasy for either team, given the seasonal dominance of Red Bull and Max Verstappen. The combined totals of the points scored by Mercedes and Ferrari were less than half those scored by the champion team. Verstappen’s score alone was over 150 points ahead of either of the rival constructors.
This contest was always likely to be decided by the placings behind Verstappen at Abu Dhabi – and so it proved. There’d been a brief shaky moment in the Red Bull camp when in Saturday practice Verstappen was only sixth-fastest and complaining of bouncing, jumping and no grip. It was Verstappen’s first real opportunity at finding this, as one of the two Friday sessions had been devoted to the obligatory running of junior drivers and most of the others had been lost to two long red flag periods. But the hope elsewhere that Red Bull had encountered a Singapore-like set of difficulties proved ill-founded and Verstappen took a relatively comfortable pole, his 13th of the season.
“We tried something which ended up disconnecting the car between high and low-speed,” explained Christian Horner of the FP3 problem, “and so just reverted back to a more normal set up for qualifying.”
Lando Norris had been vying for pole until a sideways moment exiting the Turn 13 left-hander after the hotel lost him a chunk of time in the McLaren and left him only fifth on the grid, with Charles Leclerc putting his Ferrari on the front row ahead of George Russell’s Mercedes and Oscar Piastri’s McLaren. Lewis Hamilton had failed to get his Mercedes out of Q2. Carlos Sainz – who crashed heavily on Friday as the Ferrari bottomed out over a bump which was subsequently machine-ground flat – didn’t get out of Q1. So in the constructors’ fight between the two teams, Leclerc and Russell were very much the focus.
The opening lap saw a great dice between Verstappen and Leclerc, but with the Red Bull driver always in control. By the time DRS had be
