Two races of the 2023 Formula 1 world championship are in the books, and it’s safe to say some clear trends have emerged for long season ahead.
Red Bull Racing is the favourite team — no surprises there. With both wins comfortably going the way of Milton Keynes, it’s difficult to foresee what combination of circumstance need to arise to prevent the team walking away not only with the title but with some new records to boot.
We’ve also seen major stumbles from some of the sport’s grandees. Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren have all made mistakes ahead of 2023 and are variously paying for them through either lost points or lost months of development.
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But there’s so much more in the mix, especially in the super-tight bottom half of the field, where the smallest changes are having significant effects on the competitive order.
1. RED BULL RACING — 87 points (qualifying average, two rounds)
Max Verstappen: P1 (44 points)
Sergio Perez: P2 (43 points)
Red Bull Racing’s RB19 is a trendsetting machine, with rival teams moving to increasingly adopt the team’s aero philosophy, and it’s easy to see why. We’ve raced at two very different track so far this year and the car appears to have no clear weaknesses. Niggling reliability problems could threaten, but the car is fast enough to pare back the pace for safety and still win comfortably.
The only possible hitch is the team’s ongoing wind tunnel restrictions for breaching the 2021 spending cap, which won’t ease until October. But the advantage the car already has is so large that Milton Keynes is unlikely to be too worried about it.
In Max Verstappen the team has a clear championship candidate, but Sergio Perez could be the wildcard. He was superb in Saudi Arabia to just about level the scores, and even in Bahrain he was on Verstappen’s pace. The car is more to his liking this year, and the sport needs him for a competitive year.
The only possible twist for this weekend is that Albert Park is a bogey venue for RBR. It’s only ever scored just win, back in 2011, and four other podiums in Melbourne.
It’s almost unimaginable that it couldn’t add to that tally this weekend.
Saudi Arabian GP Full Race Highlights | 06:26
2. ASTON MARTIN — 38 points (+0.547 seconds)
Fernando Alonso: P3 (30 points)
Lance Stroll: P7 (eight points)
It’s hard to know whether Aston Martin’s significant step forward this year or its consistent pace across Bahrain and Saudi Arabia is more impressive. Either way, this is a hallmark start to the campaign for the green team.
The AMR23 is happy in high-downforce configuration and with the wings trimmed for top speed. It’s good at protecting its tyres. It appears to have a broad operating window. In short, it’s everything you want in a car.
But the secret sauce is Fernando Alonso. The 41-year-old Spaniard is driving like a man half his age and with a desire that belies the two world titles he already has to his name. Remember that last year in Australia he appeared destined for a front-row start before a car failure put him out of the pole shootout — and that was in a middling Alpine machine. Now he’s got a podium-getter at his disposal.
Alonso is getting everything from the car, which is good not only for on-track results but also to validate and direct the development program.
And the update pipeline could be the difference between a great season and a truly spectacular one. Aston Martin has 60 per cent more wind tunnel time than Red Bull Racing and lesser orders of magnitude more than Ferrari and Mercedes. Use it well, and second place will become the minimum expected result.
3. MERCEDES — 38 points (+0.612 seconds)
Lewis Hamilton: P5 (20 points)
George Russell: P6 (18 points)
Mercedes hadn’t even started the first race of the year when it realised it needed to bin this year’s car and start from a blank sheet of paper. As a result, it’s in something of a holding pattern as it switches development streams.
The car itself isn’t a disaster — in fact it’s an improvement on last year’s model. It no longer bounces and it’s much less prone to random snaps of oversteer that sapped the drivers of confidence.
It still has problems — Lewis Hamilton says it’s fundamentally poorly balanced, with the cockpit too far forward — but its biggest issue is simply that it’s slow, and the team believes it has poor development potential after seeing how big a step Red Bull Racing made over the off-season.
But while development for this car has been wound down in anticipation of a new concept later in the year, the team can still squeeze the most from what it has, particularly with Hamilton still in fine form and George Russell getting stronger with every race. Without any obvious vice, it still has a chance to compete ahead of Ferrari and perhaps with Aston Martin for best-of-the-rest honours.
4. FERRARI — 26 points (+0.224 seconds)
Carlos Sainz: P4 (20 points)
Charles Leclerc: P8 (six points)
Ferrari is a strong contender for let-down of the season so far. After having come up with a title-contending car last year — only unreliability and strategy counted it out of the fight — it appears to have made very little progress in 2023, dropping it will behind Red Bull Racing.
Carlos Sainz has even suggested that Ferrari now understands that its aero model had less development potential than RBR. It’s worryingly similar to the sounds Mercedes has made and suggests the Italian team might have to follow a similar time-consuming route if it wants to return to title contention in the next 24 months.
The problem is race pace, and in particular the way the car overuses the tyres, a long-running Ferrari problem. The deficit on Sunday is estimate to be more than three times the average qualifying gap.
But that qualifying pace is what gives the team hope. Two races in a row Charles Leclerc has come painfully close to denying Red Bull Racing pole position, and team principal Frédéric Vasseur has insisted that means that race pace can be unlocked without drastic changes.
This time last year Ferrari dominated the Australian Grand Prix. Perhaps this year’s race could be the tonic the long-suffering tifosi need.
5. ALPINE — eight points (+1.010 seconds)
Esteban Ocon: P10 (four points)
Pierre Gasly: P2 (four points)
It’s difficult to get a solid read on the French team after two very different grands prix. It executed so poorly in Bahrain that the round is unrepresentative, while in Saudi Arabia it was untouchable in fifth, albeit still well behind the frontrunning four teams.
But race pace on both weekends was very heartening following an off-season of insistence that the car had taken a step forward, and what we’ve seen so far strongly suggests Alpine is the fifth-best team on average.
It seems unlikely to move forward from there, but last year the team had a massive development program that saw it bringing updates to almost every race. If Ferrari and Mercedes ahead stagnate, it might give the blue cars a shot at bigger finishes.
Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon is a strong drive pairing, and so far there’s been no sign of the teenage tension that used to wrack the former childhood friendship — a relief, surely, to team management.
6. ALFA ROMEO — four points (+1.466 seconds)
Valtteri Bottas: P9 (four points)
Zhou Guanyu: P17 (no points)
The deeper into the midfield you get, the less consistent the two races to date look. Alfa Romeo looked like a genuine midfield lead in Bahrain, but the car just didn’t click with the fast Saudi Arabian track, and a car problem for Valtteri Bottas prevented him from collecting any big finish in the race.
That goes some way to illustrating just how tight the bottom half of the field is. Even relatively small mistakes will dump a team and its drivers to the back.
In Bottas the team has a previous Australian Grand Prix race winner — and a very relaxed one at that. Bottas has leaned heavily into his adopted Australian homeland this weekend, describing Melbourne as his de facto home race, and he’s really thriving out of the spotlight of Mercedes and the shadow of former teammate Lewis Hamilton. Zhou Guanyu has also been coming into his own late in his rookie campaign and early this year.
When the team executes well, this driver-constructor combination isn’t to be underestimated.
7. HAAS — one point (+1.144 seconds)
Kevin Magnussen: P12 (one point)
Nico Hülkenberg: P15 (no points)
Haas has some truly bittersweet memories of Melbourne.
Albert Park is the scene of its first race, in which Romain Grosjean scored an improbably sixth in 2016. But despite fielding a competitive car in 2017, both Grosjean and new teammate Kevin Magnussen retired with technical problems.
Things then got wacky in 2018, the team’s best season to date. Having been set to finish just off the podium, both drivers retired after botched pit stops sent them onto the track with loose wheels. The same happened to Grosjean again in 2019, though at least Magnussen rescued another sixth.
Last year the team struggled for competitiveness in Australia, and this year it’s been difficult to judge whether to put more stock in Bahrain, where it qualified well but raced poorly, or Saudi Arabia, where the opposite was true. But the car clearly has potential to be unlocked, enough to keep it from the back of the field.
8. WILLIAMS — one point (+1.741 seconds)
Alex Albon: P13 (one point)
Logan Sargeant: P16 (no points)
After years anchored to the bottom of the championship, Williams appears to have made a genuine step this year — nothing huge, but enough not to guarantee it last place in the standings.
The car is more consistent and less volatile, which facilitated what’s fast become a trademark Alex Albon ambitious strategy play in Bahrain to score him an unlikely point.
That’s how he cracked the top 10 in Melbourne last year too, saving his mandatory pit stop for the final lap to secure a much-needed point for Williams. The best drivers only ever need a sniff of a chance to come alive.
9. ALPHATAURI — no points (+1.683 seconds)
Yuki Tsunoda: P14 (no points)
Nyck de Vries: P18 (no points)
The Austrian-owned Italian team has failed to step forwards on last year’s disappointing ninth-place finish in the standings based on the two races to date, but Yuki Tsunoda appears to have made some encouraging progress in his position as team leader.
His first two races have been wonderfully solid, but his forlorn defence of 10th place from Kevin Magnussen in Saudi Arabia was spectacular. His car had no right to keep the Haas at bay for as many laps as it did, and for the crash-prone Japanese driver to hold him back without a costly mistake was genuinely heartening.
If the team can truly nail its set-up an execution, a feisty Tsunoda shouldn’t be bet against.
That’s not to underestimate Formula E world champion Nyck de Vries either. While the Dutchman is clearly taking more time than hoped to adjust to F1, all reports are that his technical feedback is excellent and valuable — enough to make the difference for the team when the margins in the midfield are so fine.
Williams hopping to vault into midfield | 02:41
10. MCLAREN — no points (+1.326 seconds)
Oscar Piastri: P19 (no points)
Lando Norris: P20 (no points)
McLaren’s qualifying deficit is flattered a little by Oscar Piastri’s excellent Q3 appearance in Jeddah, but arguably its position in the standings is also deceptively bad considering the misfortune of the opening lap in Saudi Arabia that effectively took both cars out of the race in a competitive sense.
That said, its raw race pace didn’t look like anything special last time out. While it’s difficult to say for certain where the car should go in the pecking order in a clean race, which should temper expectations that any kind of big step might be on the cards this weekend, notwithstanding that Melbourne was the team’s best race last year bar the wet and wild Singapore Grand Prix.
Lando Norris is a proven operator, but Melburnian Piastri proved his rookie status won’t stop him from turning in spectacular results with his Jeddah quali performance. While he has no real home-track advantage here given he’s never raced at Albert Park, it’s perhaps wise not to discount nay heroics from the 21-year-old — even if they’re unlikely to deliver points.
