Mexican GP conclusions: Verstappen own worst enemy, end feels nigh for Perez

Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz claimed his second victory of the F1 2024 season in the Mexican Grand Prix on a day Lando Norris and Max Verstappen came to blows at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez.

On a weekend home hero and Red Bull driver Sergio Perez ‘s season also slumped to a new low, here are our conclusions from Mexico City…

Conclusions from the 2024 Mexican Grand Prix

Max Verstappen’s greatest threat to the F1 2024 title? Himself

For quite a while it seemed that the Hungarian Grand Prix would end up winning Max Verstappen the F1 2024 title.

That may seem illogical given that Verstappen finished fifth in Budapest on a day McLaren stormed to a one-two finish, yet it wasn’t so much the result as the valuable lesson that race taught him.

That, you’ll recall, was the afternoon Verstappen wanted to take on the world, lashing out over team radio at his car, his race engineer, the Red Bull strategy team and anyone who got in his way, culminating in a frustrated lunge on his old foe Lewis Hamilton for which he was fortunate to escape a penalty.

Verstappen that day was the walking, talking embodiment of Martin Brundle’s old adage that a racing car driven in anger only ever goes sideways or backwards.

Yet even if his parting shot on the day was to tell his critics to eff off, Verstappen seemed to learn from it.

With the McLaren emerging as F1’s fastest car, any more days like that – tempestuous, irascible, self-defeating – would have seen his points advantage over Lando Norris disappear in double-quick time.

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It has been noticeable that in the months since that Verstappen has largely tried to keep the emotion out of it and maintain his own self-discipline.

The frustrations with the RB20, and the situation in which he has found himself after such a dominant start to F1 2024, are still nagging away at him – yet Max appeared to be compartmentalising it, keeping everything bubbling below the surface.

He wouldn’t take any pleasure from it, of course, but he would accept the limitations of his machinery and simply maximise its potential on each given weekend, leaving it to his tag-team partner – sorry, father – Jos to be the enforcer, conveying Max’s real thoughts to the world, and specifically Red Bull’s management, via the media.

No more Hungarys. That would do it. That would take care of business for 2024.

It was all the more disappointing, then, that Vicious Max – the Max of Jeddah 2021 – reared his ugly head once more in Mexico.

And for what reason?

With a lead of 57 points to play with entering this race, a loss of three to Norris – the difference between third and fourth place – would hardly have registered at this stage of the season.

Especially after what Verstappen himself described as a “terrible” start to the weekend, his Q3 lap for second on the grid – in the context of his lack of practice running and deleted first run – one of the outstanding feats by any driver all season.

People tend to describe it as a red mist descending in these scenarios, yet what happens to Verstappen when he is in one of these moods – more bear with a sore head than Dutch lion – is something far darker and sinister.

Just how aggressive – how destructive – will F1’s answer to the Incredible Hulk get?

Where exactly, in his furious mind, is the line? How much can you trust him when his judgement seems to be blinded by rage?

For all the criticism Norris has faced for his tentativeness in battle with Verstappen recently, it is perhaps no surprise that he and others stray on the cautious side when it comes to racing him wheel to wheel.

Maybe that’s the intention, precisely why Max does what he does in the way he does it.

And so what should have been quite a minor points loss to Norris here ended up being 10 – the biggest heap of points he has given away to Lando in a single race all year, excluding his retirement in Australia.

Still a lead of 47, still probably enough to see it home from here. But not as comfortable as it was and – worst of all – totally and utterly self inflicted.

If the World Championship is somehow lost come the chequered flag in Abu Dhabi, let the inquest start at Lap 10 of the Mexican Grand Prix.

Verstappen’s greatest threat to his title over these final four races? It’s not Norris, McLaren, Ferrari or even that annoyingly reluctant Red Bull of his.

It’s himself.

Why exactly did Red Bull give Sergio Perez a new contract?

Helmut Marko worked out how to manage Sergio Perez a couple of years ago: keep the pressure on; treat him mean to keep him keen.

It did not escape Dr Marko’s attention that Perez’s performances fell off a cliff not long after his Monaco Grand Prix victory was rewarded with a new two-year contract in May 2022.

With his medium-term future secure, Marko realised, Perez allowed himself to relax, his standards to drop and his form to aimlessly drift. Red Bull would not be making the same mistake next time, he vowed.

So how to explain the decision to hand Perez another two-year deal in June this year?

Perez’s extension, you’ll recall, was announced just as his season was starting to wobble, his Q2 exit after a crash in FP3 at Imola followed by a disastrous weekend in Monaco, where he lapped slower even than Logan Sargeant (remember him?) in Q1 before being caught up in the mother of all first-lap accidents with Kevin Magnussen.

If Red Bull’s intention at that stage was to stabilise Perez’s season – to reassure him and put him a little more at ease just as his mid-2023 slump was threatening to happen again, hoping his troubles would magically disappear overnight – it flew in the face of everything the team thought they knew about him.

More likely, it has become apparent, is that this new contract was actually the first step towards getting rid of him – a superficial show of faith yet one crucially giving Red Bull an out if Perez proved incapable of arresting his struggles this time.

Much of the conversation over recent months, after all, has surrounded the stricter performance clauses said to be contained in Perez’s revised deal.

It is common knowledge by now that one of these very nearly did for him over the summer break, giving Red Bull the freedom to drop him as he was in excess of 100 points adrift behind Max Verstappen after the Belgian Grand Prix.

PlanetF1.com revealed at the time that Perez came as close as a driver ever can be to being replaced, to the point that Red Bull even arranged a shootout test between Daniel Ricciardo and Liam Lawson at Imola to inform a decision on Verstappen’s new team-mate, before the decision was taken to retain him for the second half of the season.

Perez may have survived after Spa, but if such a clause existed at the mid-season point it would come as some surprise if a similar mechanism is not available to the team at the end of the year – especially now his points deficit to Verstappen has ballooned to a scarcely believable 212 (!) points.

Marko, likely taking great pleasure in telling everyone behind the scenes at Red Bull that he saw this coming all along, appeared to confirm it earlier this week, claiming that Perez’s new contract will be no obstacle to the team making a change to their driver lineup for F1 2025.

It will never stop being a gift to sportswriters everywhere that the Mexican Grand Prix falls at the same time of year as the Day of the Dead festival, when a nation unites to remember – to celebrate – all the lost souls.

Once a race of refuge, an annual life-affirming event to remind him exactly why he keeps doing this job after all these years, more than ever in 2024 Perez’s home race had the air of a wake.

That new contract? Far from injecting new life into him, it has turned out to be a kiss of death.

The doctor’s verdict has arrived and it’s terminal. The end is nigh.

Class personified: A victory to savour for Carlos Sainz

Savour your success, cherish the joyous moments. Because who is to say when – if – they will ever come around again?

It has never been more true than in the case of Carlos Sainz, entering the emotional final weeks of what will remain an unfulfilled Ferrari career.

It is an unprecedented situation in which he has found himself in F1 2024, dropped ahead of the new season for no reason other than the fact that his name is not Lewis Hamilton.

If there were problems at Ferrari over recent years, most were in agreement that the driver lineup of Sainz and Charles Leclerc was not among them.

Ferrari will almost certainly not regret the signing of Hamilton for F1 2025 and beyond. Yet breaking up that productive partnership between the princes of Maranello felt – still feels – unnecessary. Unjust. Needless. Did it really have to be this way?

Few would have blamed Sainz for being swarmed by self-pity this year, ejected from the most famous team of all just as they look to be on to something good.

Yet if his victory in Australia, a fortnight after appendicitis surgery, was a mark of the strength of his character, so is the dignified way in which he has taken, and responded to, the news of his Ferrari exit this year.

Not once has he complained publicly about his treatment by Ferrari, acknowledging that he is simply the sacrificial lamb, an unfortunate victim of circumstance.

Still he has sworn allegiance to the Prancing Horse, as though that awkward conversation with Fred Vasseur last winter never even happened.

If he grew tired of the weekly questions over his next move across the first half of the season, it did not show as he faced them with honesty and transparency.

And, God bless him, he has approached his 2025 adventure with Williams with the most open pair of eyes, seeing nothing but the positives even when it must hurt like hell to be trading a title-contending car for one still far from certain to reach Q3 most weekends.

He has been class personified, a credit to his teams – yes, both of them – and his family.

There is every possibility that the Mexican Grand Prix will prove the final victory of Sainz’s Formula 1 career, that the count will stop at just four wins.

Williams, though, are not the only ones hoping that he will see the top step of a grand prix podium again some day.

Ferrari: Constructors’ title contenders AND F1 2024 kingmakers?

Usually in sport it’s all about the three-year plan.

Unless, of course, you happen to be in charge of Alpine – those great pioneers of the 100-race/five-year plan, which only ever succeeds in kicking the can ever further down the road for the next hapless bunch to try and sort out – three years is roughly the time it takes to affect meaningful, long-lasting change in a team.

It is a reflection of the impact of Fred Vasseur, then, that Ferrari have arrived 12 months ahead of schedule, growing in confidence by the race of shimmying into the gap between a warring McLaren and Red Bull to land what not too long ago seemed an unlikely Constructors’ Championship.

And who knows?

If only Ferrari had avoided their post-Barcelona lull, when they fell into the dreaded ground-effect trap of adding too much downforce without enough consideration for the car’s driveability, a first World Championship of any kind since 2008 might already be on its way to Maranello.

The final four races will put to an early stress test the principles Vasseur has sought to implement since his appointment in 2022, namely remaining calm under pressure, blocking out the external noise, being at ease with taking risks even when the most valuable prizes of all – see Charles Leclerc’s bold, race-winning one-stop strategy at Monza – are on the line.

This will be a measure, above all, of how far Ferrari have come, yet also of how long they still have left to travel.

They are far from favourites, of course. Not with McLaren still holding a 29-point lead and both drivers generally contributing with consistent points.

But it is precisely that – having nothing to lose as Red Bull and McLaren keep eyeing each other, hands gliding towards their holsters – which makes Ferrari so dangerous.

And could they still influence the outcome of the Drivers’ Championship too?

When Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris collected consecutive victories for McLaren in Baku and Singapore respectively, it seemed Ferrari could emerge as Verstappen and Red Bull’s worst enemy for the rest of F1 2024, getting between the title contenders and helping Lando to potentially take large, consistent bites out of Max’s lead.

With the Ferrari now emerging as the fastest car itself, however, they may prove instead to be Verstappen’s greatest ally – provided there really are no more Hungarys or Mexicos from here – limiting the damage Norris can inflict at each given race.

Certainly, McLaren’s appeal against Norris’s five-second penalty in Austin lost much of its shock and awe when it dawned that three measly points were resting on the outcome at a time Lando is in need of something more substantial.

And next year?

Whisper it for now, but Ferrari could enter a new season with more confidence, more factors in their favour, than at any stage since the end of the Todt/Schumacher/Brawn era.

Fred Red Redemption? Vive la Fred’olution? Whatever you want to call it, something is building here.

Ayao Komatsu has turned Haas into a team of serious substance

Here’s a question for you: where will Guenther Steiner be when F1 races in Brazil this Sunday?

Not in the paddock at Interlagos, you see, but on stage in York, the next stop on his UK theatre tour.

The following night takes him to Blackpool – the perfect place to get into the spirit for F1’s second trip to Las Vegas, you’d assume – with shows planned all the way to Tunbridge Wells next July.

As finales go it’s not exactly Yas Marina, but each to their own.

As Steiner cements his status as F1’s performing monkey – star of stage, screen, podcast and bookshelf – the team he left behind at the beginning of F1 2024 are fast emerging as a grand prix operation of serious substance.

Gone are the days of Guenther’s House of Fun, for under the new management of Ayao Komatsu this year Haas have brought a new level of respectability, seriousness and professionalism to the place.

The success of James Vowles and Andrea Stella at Williams and McLaren respectively provided an obvious template for the appointment of Komatsu last winter, bringing an engineering-focused mentality to a team who had lost their way.

His impact, on a team of significantly smaller stature, has been equally profound.

Snapping at the heels of the once-great Mercedes team in qualifying, and not a million miles behind in the race, the Mexican Grand Prix hit home the sheer scale of the transformation at Haas.

From scoring just 12 points across Steiner’s final season in charge in 2023, they have added 15 to their tally over the last two race weekends alone.

Steiner has claimed this season – likely with some justification – that the platform for Haas’s much-improved 2024 was established behind the scenes under him last year.

Yet it is the execution, turning that potential into the team’s most productive season since 2018, that has been the mark of the new-look Haas.

The team’s great leap forward, of course, has not gone unnoticed across the wider racing world with Haas announcing a landmark technical partnership with Toyota earlier this month.

It would not be a stretch to suggest that Haas owe it all to Komatsu, one of the few senior Japanese figures in F1 without a pre-existing relationship (bar a brief spell with the Honda-backed BAR team of two decades ago) with one of the two leading Japanese car manufacturers.

Little wonder, really, that Toyota pounced on the opportunity to get involved with the Haas revolution and to champion one of their own.

It is a deal – much like the signing of a rookie, Oliver Bearman, something Steiner vowed never to do again following the Mick Schumacher experience – that wouldn’t have even been possible under the chaotic previous regime.

Team principal of the year? Look no further than Komatsu.

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