After the first two races of the 2024 season, Max Verstappen has once again emerged as the favorite to wrap up this year’s championship. During the season-opening Bahrain GP, the Dutchman aced the competition, winning by a whopping 20+ seconds margin. At the Saudi Arabian GP, he rinsed and repeated as he got the pole and the race win. Despite the evident superiority of the RB20 and Verstappen’s alarming gap at the helm of it, McLaren’s Lando Norris doesn’t seem to be concerned with the three-time world champion’s current trajectory.
Motorsport Week quoted the McLaren driver as saying, “I don’t think it [Verstappen’s success] was concerning at all, honestly. Considering that they spent a lot of time developing and making a new car for this year, I’m pretty happy with how close we [McLaren] were to Red Bull.”
At the Saudi Arabian GP, Oscar Piastri (the lead McLaren driver in P4) finished almost 32 seconds behind Verstappen. On paper, McLaren may look miles off the pace, but comparing their situation to last year’s race, where Norris finished almost a minute behind the race-winning RB19, the Briton’s assessment of the team’s strides forward makes sense.
As things stand, the MCL38 looks comfortable in the high-speed corners. However, the RB20 boasts a lightning-quick straight-line speed and a properly balanced race car in the slower, more twisty sections of the circuits.
Can anyone catch Red Bull this year?
Red Bull is the only team that seems to have come to grips with this year’s regulations. With their exception, every team on the grid is suffering from some or the other gremlin, whether design-related or otherwise.
During last weekend’s race at the Jeddah Corniche circuit, the W15 was exposed for its still unoptimized aerodynamic package. In the middle sector, the Mercedes duo of George Russell and Lewis Hamilton lost almost half a second per lap. In Bahrain, even Ferrari suffered reliability issues, as both Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc were nursing race-long brake issues.
The only hope the Red Bull rivals have is in the developmental race over the course of the season. However, with Red Bull’s advantage over the competition, any gains made by the others can easily be neutralized by the Milton-Keynes-based outfit.
However, with the internal dynamics within the team playing out—with a potential internal power struggle that has disrupted the team from within—their rivals would hope for the Austrian team to falter as the season goes on.
