It’s been only a few days since Carlos Sainz won — and Max Verstappen lost — the Singapore Grand Prix, but the Dutchman worked his hardest to erase the memory with a comprehensive day of Friday practice in Japan.
Verstappen’s RB19 devoured Suzuka’s sweeping bends with ease to set a pair of foreboding times in both practice sessions, devastating any hope, no matter how faint it was, that Singapore was about to crack open the season and give us a fight to the finish.
It puts Red Bull Racing on track to claim the constructors championship with a roar rather than a whimper.
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But Ferrari fans need not feel too disappointed after Friday, with the progress made in Singapore appearing to have been genuine. The Scuderia looks to by making a play for best of the rest in Suzuka — 16 rounds too late, but promising all the same.
The chasing pack is close though, with McLaren certainly in the mix and Mercedes potentially not far off — if it can sort out the balance problems plaguing it through the high-speed corners.
NORMAL PROGRAMMING RESUMES WITH VERSTAPPEN
It’s probably overstating things to say Verstappen has turned up in Suzuka with a point to prove after his first defeat of the season. To say the Dutchman has any point he must make this weekend is a stretch.
But there’s no doubting he’s primed to restore order after last week’s freelancing result, and he started by putting more than 0.3 seconds in hand over next-best Charles Leclerc and looked completely untroubled on a circuit seemingly made for his car.
“It felt really good today,” he said. “From lap one the car was enjoyable to drive again. It seems like we had a strong day on short runs and long runs.
“There’s a lot of degradation on this track, so it’ll be quite tough on tyres in the race, but so far I think we’ve had a good start to the weekend.
“We just focus on ourselves and try to optimise our performance. If we do that, I’m confident that we’ll fight for pole.”
It wasn’t just Verstappen either. Cruel though it might sound to say, but Sergio Pérez has reverted to the mean too, ending the afternoon more than a second slower than his teammate and with work still to do.
To be fair to the Mexican, in FP1 he was using the pre-Singapore floor, and in FP2 he got only one run on the soft tyres. Verstappen, on the other hand, had two cracks on softs and the benefit of the new parts throughout the day.
“We were pretty off-balance on our side,” Pérez said. “I think we’ve got a pretty good understanding of the direction we need to take.
“I look forward to qualifying well tomorrow because degradation seems to be quite high around this place, especially with the hot temperatures we are expecting.
“I do believe that we’re going to be strong tomorrow and also on Sunday.”
But even if Pérez has left some time on the table due to circumstance, the gap to Verstappen will require some serious bridging.
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FERRARI LOOKS SURPRISINGLY GOOD AGAIN
Ferrari drivers were Verstappen’s closest challengers in both practice sessions, and while it wasn’t especially close — 0.6 seconds in FP1 and 0.3 seconds in FP2 — the fact the team is in the mix at all is interesting.
The SF23 has typically hated these sorts of high-downforce tracks. Think about Silverstone, where both Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz faded badly in the race.
But in recent months Ferrari has been adamant that it’s made a breakthrough with its understanding of this car, as hinted at by victory in Singapore, which on paper shouldn’t have been such a strong circuit.
“We are understanding our car much better than we did before Zandvoort, and that helps us to be on the good side of things, because everything is so close with McLaren and Mercedes that whenever we put our car in the right window we can be in front,” Leclerc said.
“That’s what we’ve done in the last three races. That’s what the target is for tomorrow.”
Now it looks reasonably quick in Suzuka, with a new floor helping Leclerc unlock more of the car’s latent speed.
“It did what we expected it to do, which gave us a little bit of consistency, which was good to see,” Leclerc said of his new parts. “Obviously we keep learning about this car. The last two and three races we learnt a lot. Now it’s about putting it all together, which we did in Singapore; we need to do that here too.
“Red Bull seems to be extremely quick this weekend, but I don’t think we are so far.”
Leclerc lost time mainly at the first and second corners and again at turn 7, both fast and long-radius turns, as expected. But for the rest of the lap — including Spoon, another long and fast corner — he was roughly a match. In fact the Monegasque ended the day with the fastest time in the middle split.
And while Ferrari still appeared to have worse tyre wear than the likes of Mercedes and even McLaren last week in Marina Bay, in practice here it didn’t look quite so bad, with the SF-23 again best of the rest on the long-run averages.
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Long-run average, mediums
Red Bull Racing: 1:37.548 (7 laps)
Ferrari: 1:38.072 (6 laps)
Aston Martin: 1:38.676 (6 laps)
McLaren: 1:39.000 (3 laps)
Alpine: 1:39.104 (7 laps)
Williams: 1:39.181 (7 laps)
Haas: 1:39.214 (9 laps)
Long-run average, softs
McLaren: 1:38.017 (4 laps)
Mercedes: 1:38.627 (7 laps)
AlphaTauri: 1:38.718 (6 laps)
Aston Martin: 1:38.880 (7 laps)
Long-run average, hards
Alfa Romeo: 1:38.319 (7 laps)
Williams: 1:39.264 (7 laps)
But the long-run simulations also revealed one other crucial bit of information for this weekend’s race: tyre degradation looks very high.
Wear rates will improve as the track grips up, but this is usually a two-stop race by default. A third stop for anyone suffering significant wear would be costly given the difficult passing around what is a narrow track with few big braking zones, which means there’ll likely be much thermal management on Sunday, when warmer and sunnier conditions are forecast.
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MERCEDES PROBLEMS OPENS UP PODIUM FIGHT
George Russell was the fastest Mercedes by the afternoon, but he was still some 0.64 seconds off the pace. Lewis Hamilton was almost twice as far back after a difficult day for the older Briton.
Mercedes’s weakness is all in the iconic first-sector esses, where the W14 is being slaughtered by the RB19. Russell was at times 15 kilometres per hour down on Verstappen’s maximum speed through the bends; he dropped more than 0.8 seconds to the Dutchman in the first sector alone.
Hamilton, meanwhile, appeared to be struggling with balance issues, being fractionally off Russell around the entire lap.
“It was definitely a bad day,” Hamilton said. “Really a struggle out there — a long way off.
“Our car has more often than not been a little bit weaker in the high-speed corners. It’s an area where we need to work on, get the car more in a sweet spot and not overheat our tyres as much.”
Russell was at least optimistic that he’d had a “half-reasonable day” but was wary of several threats in the battle to be best of the rest.
“Were not too far from P2, so it’s going to be a good fight between Ferrari and Lando [Norris],” he said. “But also you’ve got cars like Alex [Albon] up there, as you often see in qualifying.
“It’s not going to be a straightforward fight for the top end of Q3.”
Mercedes’s trend relative to Red Bull Racing is generally repeated against McLaren. Lando Norris makes up all his time on Russell in the first sector, with the gap then stable for the rest of the lap.
But Norris warned there’d be more to come from his car if the team can tame its skittishness on the surprisingly low-grip Suzuka surface.
“The pace has been pretty good today,” he said “But the car feels pretty all over the place.
“I think for us if we can just try to calm it down a little bit, bring the balance together, I think we can have a good day tomorrow.
“I doubt it’s going to be pole — Red Bull is just doing normal Red Bull at the minute — but we’re not far away.”
Piastri, who was adjusting to McLaren’s latest upgrade package and sampling Suzuka for the first time, was half a second down on Norris, but as we’ve seen several times this season, that gap tends to close come Saturday.
“I enjoyed it,” he said. “I think it’s still a bit of room to improve for myself. It’s been a pretty positive day for the team. We’ve been pretty quick — not a bad first day in Suzuka.”
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GASLY A REMINDER THAT THIS TRACK BITES HARD
It was such an innocuous mistake, but it carried with it an overstated consequence.
Pierre Gasly was less than three minutes away from ending second practice an underwhelming but clean 19th.
But nearing the end of a race simulation on the medium tyres, he entered the second Degner and understeered off the track.
At so many other corners it would’ve been a harmless cruise over some tarmac or even a quick skip through the stones.
But Suzuka is a punishing old-school circuit, and it bites hard.
Gasly skidded through the gravel, dragged his front-left tyre against the barrier and snapped his suspension, forcing a red flag and early end to the session.
The second Degner is one of Suzuka’s riskiest corners, with the bridge support leaving little space for run-off despite the momentum carried onto the apex. We saw several driver flirt with disaster through there early in the session, with both Alex Albon and Lewis Hamilton believing they picked up floor damage skating over the kerbs. Oscar Piastri also ran wide through the same turn.
But otherwise the first two practice sessions were surprisingly clean — not a sign of perfection but rather of the safety margin required to guarantee a clean Friday before risking it all for qualifying.
WHAT’S NEXT?
The 2023 Japanese Grand Prix is live and ad-break free during racing on Kayo Sports and Fox Sports 506.
Final practice is at 1:30pm on Saturday, with qualifying at 5pm.
Pre-race coverage for the Japanese Grand Prix is from 2:30pm, with lights out at 4:00pm.
