adminMax Verstappen arrived at the Miami Grand Prix determined to make amends for his defeat in Azerbaijan the previous weekend, and he left having made an emphatic statement of his superiority over Red Bull team-mate Sergio Perez.
The Mexican, by contrast, started the weekend in Florida expressing his confidence that he could keep up his unexpected title challenge against Verstappen for the entire season. He ended the race chastened, unable to explain how his team-mate had shown such crushing superiority.
This was a statement victory by Verstappen, who won from ninth place on the grid with almost disdainful ease.
It was not so much that the Dutchman was able to carve through the field with ease after a difficult qualifying session; it was what he did to Perez in the process.
It took Verstappen just 14 laps to ease his way into second place. Perez needed to use those early laps to extend an advantage, but he was just 3.3 seconds ahead when Verstappen passed Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin.
Already, Perez said, he “knew the race was looking difficult”. And when, after his pit stop, he was unable to close on Verstappen despite having tyres that were 20 laps fresher, he knew it was over.
Remarkably, by the time Verstappen made his pit stop with 12 laps to go, he was extending his advantage over Perez. He came out just a second behind and was past and gone within not much more than a lap.
It was, as Red Bull team principal Christian Horner put it, “an absolutely outstanding performance”.
It was quite a statement from Verstappen, who had been flat beaten by Perez around the streets of Baku the previous weekend.
“He came out of Baku disappointed,” Horner said. “Checo was the faster guy there, particularly on Sunday, and Max came here really wanting to reassert himself.”
Verstappen was stunning in Miami from the off, consistently 0.5secs or so a lap faster than Perez. But things went off the rails briefly in qualifying on Saturday.
Verstappen made an error on his first lap in the final session and aborted it. And when Charles Leclerc crashed his Ferrari having gone out early on the final runs, that was the session over. Ninth place it would be for Verstappen.
It felt at the time as though he had handed Perez a present. As it turned out, it simply provided Verstappen a chance to demonstrate his superiority.
Perez was struggling with the medium tyres in the opening stint, saying they felt “quite fragile”. But he was barely any faster than Alonso’s second placed Aston Martin, which is a considerably slower car, even if driven by an outstanding driver doing another stellar race.
Either Perez was over-cautious, or he was too hard on his tyres. Whichever it was, he failed to build the advantage he needed. Then, having seen Verstappen behind him before his pit stop, he sealed his own fate by pushing too hard early in his second stint and cooking his tyres.
“Max deserves the victory,” he said. “He was the strongest car out there. I have to understand what went wrong. It’s really simple. When you don’t have the race pace, it is really hard to win the race.”
Verstappen’s win had it all. He was way faster than Perez. He looked after his tyres far better, despite his pace advantage coming from the high-speed section through Turns Two to Six. And he drove more intelligently.
It was a champion’s drive, one that suggested Perez’s title challenge will turn out to be the illusion most in F1 expect it always was.
The only negative point of the day was that Verstappen was booed both during the razzmatazz, showbiz build-up to the race, when the drivers were introduced to the crowd one by one by LL Cool J, and on the podium. Verstappen shrugged it off.
“If I would be driving in the back nobody would be doing anything in terms of reaction,” he said. “It is normal when you are winning and they don’t like who is winning. It is fine for me. I get to stand on the top. I take the trophy home and they go back to their houses and they can have a nice evening.” – BBC Sport.
Online Reporter