Max Verstappen secured his 6th win out of 8 races this season today at the Canadian Grand Prix. Verstappen has finished on the podium in every race this season providing him with a 69 championship point lead as we conclude coverages of Round 9 of 23 this year. The win also marked the 100th win for Red Bull and Verstappen ties Ayrton Senna’s total win record at 41 wins. The Red Bulls have be dominant this season as Red Bull Racing has won every race in 2023 between Verstappen and Sergio Perez. The team currently holds a 154 point lead over Mercedes in second place.
The fairytale continues for Fernando Alonso (Aston Martin). Alonso secured his 6th podium of the 2023 season this weekend drawing him closer to approaching the second place spot in the championship. Alonso is currently 9 points behind Sergio Perez due to Perez having less than stellar results the last three races. Perez was able to save one point by securing the fastest lap of the race as a consolation.
Improvement from Mercedes
Mercedes seems to have worked out some of the kinks with Lewis Hamilton’s car W14. As reported by PlanetF1.com after the race Hamilton stated, “Well, firstly, quite an honor to be up there with two World Champions. I was really excited to be third and just trying to be in that mix. But unfortunately, we didn’t have the pace today. We knew that this weekend, this wouldn’t be our strongest circuit as we struggle in the lower speed corners particularly, and that’s really where I was losing to Fernando and to Max – just on traction out of Turn 2, out of pretty much every corner.”
“But we’ve got a lot of work to do just to add rear downforce to the car, and a little bit more efficiency, but we’re chipping away as I said, and I do believe we will get there at some stage. Max was a little bit gone, but I think our paces were a little bit closer today so we’re going in the right direction. It’s honestly been a great weekend for us. I think we’re slowly chipping away, I think the Astons took a little bit of step ahead this weekend when they had the upgrades but we’re working on bringing some more moving forwards.”
No Luck for Russell and Sargeant
There were two drivers that didn’t finish the race. The first being Logan Sargeant who has not found a groove since making the jump to F1 and Mercedes driver George Russell who had to retire the car on lap 55 of the race. Sargeant was told that there was a critical error with his car and was told to retire. It was later revealed that the team spotted oil leaking from the car and without knowing the extent of damage they retired the car to live to fight another day.
Sargeant had the following words, “We had a really good start to the race with a car we could fight with. I had the AlphaTauri ahead under quite a bit of pressure and I felt quick. Unfortunately, I got the message to stop the car as soon as possible due to an issue which ended my race. I’ve learned a lot this weekend from using the full wet tires, driving in the wet, and driving on the inters on a drying track. Honestly in the dry, I feel like we’ve been pretty quick. It didn’t work out today, but we can be positive going to Austria.”
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