The ridiculously talented combination of Max Verstappen driving a car designed by Adrian Newey has to be stopped, man. They can’t just keep getting away with this. Having secured the 2023 championship with the most dominant season in F1 history, these psychopaths aren’t content with best, they have to just smash the competition to pieces. Instead of an evolutionary development of last year’s RB19, the 2024 RB20 is a completely different aerodynamic concept, and it already looks like Red Bull has gained more pace than the rest of the grid. It’s only pre-season testing, and we can’t completely rule out other teams packing a few bags of sand into their cars, but we all already know Max is going to win the championship this year.
Search your feelings. You know it to be true.
The flying Dutchman showed up on Wednesday in Bahrain and totally waxed the floor with the competition. The Red Bull Racing driver not only turned a 1:31.344 lap (compared to Lando Norris’ best lap for McLaren at 1:32.484), but he also ran 143 laps of testing. Including Max’s outlier, the average number of laps run by each of the eighteen drivers who took part in day one of testing was just 68.6. Logan Sargeant managed just 21 laps in the Williams, while George Russell did second most at 122 laps for Mercedes. Max ran two and a half races worth of laps, and still managed to kick in the fastest time of the day.
By the end of 2023 the McLaren and Mercedes teams were starting to catch up to Red Bull in terms of single lap pace, but the RB19 was significantly easier on its tires than the competition, which made for much better race pace. If that continues to be the case in 2024, they might as well call Max the winner right now. Fortunately for the fans who haven’t given up on F1, the McLaren, Ferrari, Visa Cash App RB, Alpine, and Aston Martins all ended up within a second of each other, so the race for second place should be pretty strong. Mercedes (we hope) never put in a push lap, as Russell’s best time was 2.765 seconds off Verstappen’s.
If there’s one thing we can count on in 2024, it’s Red Bull at the front and Haas at the back. It’ll take 24 races to determine where the other eight teams shake out. Is it worth watching to find out?
Testing continues in Bahrain through February 23, and the season opens with the first round at the same track with qualifying on March 1 and lights go out for the inaugural Grand Prix of the 2024 season on March 2. Congratulations, Max!