Stoddie Straight: Props to Red Bull, but questionable driving elsewhere

What an interesting weekend! Some very significant records were broken. First of all, we had Verstappen matching Senna’s tally of 41 wins, but equally, and if not more importantly, it was the 100th win for Red Bull. That’s no mean feat, given the years they’ve been in the sport.

And finally, and again, well worth mentioning, Adrian Newey’s 200th Grand Prix win. That is just outstanding. The guy’s been responsible for about 20 percent of the wins of every F1 race held since 1950, before he was born.

So congratulations to Red Bull and Christian Horner, since having coming into the sport almost 20 years ago. The kind of stuff you get thrown at you, day after day, week after week, year after year, he’s steered that team through all of it.

For Adrian Newey, there are just no words, he is Mr Formula 1. And Max Verstappen, in such a short career, to get to 41 victories. Yes, he’s had the car, but he’s certainly got the talent, and you can’t have one without the other. Well done to everybody at Red Bull, the whole Milton Keynes team. They really want to be proud of themselves.

A tribute to Dietrich Mateschitz

Of course, you can’t forget Helmut Marko, and of course, you have to mention Dietrich Mateschitz, because without him, none of this would have happened, and Adrian and Christian would be the first to admit it’s a group effort.

But nevertheless, the group is only as good as its leaders, and the job that Christian, Adrian and Helmut have done, together with Mateschitz, over the past almost 20 years is pretty much second to none in the history of F1.

Mateschitz was a man of his word. Like Bernie, the shaking of the hand was the deal, not anything else. The paperwork always came later.

And the few things that I asked for, when Red Bull bought Minardi in 2005, was that no team personnel were got rid of, or if they had to be got rid of, they were paid out a handsome amount, and all of that was honoured. It was a faultless deal.

I just could not speak highly enough of Dietrich and the way that that whole transaction went through, but that’s why he got where he got. There are two types of people in this world. There’s those that talk, and those that deliver, and Dietrich was definitely the latter.

Close racing for podium places in 2023

Fernando Alonso’s race in Canada was excellent. He was bit unlucky with a couple of things. I really think that incident with Hamilton in the pit lane was worthy of a five-second penalty at the least, but was also very dangerous, because it could have ruined both their races.

I think Fernando felt he had a chance of victory yesterday, and he did. But to be honest, Max is in a league of his own. These days, you just assume that Max has won the race and then look at the battle from second down, because it’s a very interesting battle. There are several cars now vying for that third spot on the podium, or even, on some days, second spot on the podium, and it’s making the racing exciting.

That may be a bit controversial, because a lot of people may think back to the Hamilton-Mercedes era where they could win every race, and that is the case with Max, but there’s teams bunched up quite a bit after Max – and I’m not including Sergio Perez at the moment, because his form lately has put him back amongst the Mercedes, Ferraris and Astons.

I do think it’s almost a foregone conclusion that Max and Red Bull will take both championships well before the end of the year, but the battles for second and third are proving really exciting. You really don’t know who’s going to be where until the race settles in.

In Canada, Mercedes’ upgrades certainly worked. The fourth and fifth position of Ferrari shows that there’s a slight return to form, though they’ve still got issues. And realistically, you think of the next group, which is led by Alpine, and includes McLaren.

On a good day, you’ll see someone like Albon up there – his seventh place was definitely the drive of the weekend. You’ll find various ones pop up where you don’t expect them. But the saddest thing for me personally was to see my former team, AlphaTauri, sitting at the bottom of the table with two points.

It shows how close that last group of four teams is, but it’s a sign of the times that when a team with AlphaTauri’s resources can end up bottom of the table, it shows that the racing is close.

Mistakes creeping in up and down the field

Perez started on the hard tyres, which was the right choice, but got caught up in that DRS train and had nowhere to go. In the case of George, obviously he put it into the wall, a bit harder than I think he initially thought, and certainly harder than the team thought. That was quite a substantial hit, and I’m surprised that he continued for as long as he did.

But George’s mistake, Checo’s mistakes, mistakes at Ferrari on any given day between one of the drivers – Leclerc again, out of Q2. They’re not doing themselves any favours.

And then you have somebody like Gasly, who was just completely denied a Q3 position by Carlos Sainz almost falling asleep in the middle of the final corner. Some of the driving standards really do leave a bit to be desired, to be honest.

You see it across the teams. Look at McLaren, you’ve got Lando Norris who can make mistakes, Oscar Piastri put it into the wall. There are drivers that are just not doing themselves any favours. I know we’ve got a few rookies this year, and Piastri has clearly come out as the best of them. But you look at others like Nyck de Vries, who’s just nowhere to be seen. Teams that don’t have at least one outstanding driver are struggling, and that’s quite sad to see.

You now see the top 10 quite regularly separated by less than a second, and sometimes you see right down to 20th separated by less than two seconds, and that’ll include somebody like Logan Sargeant who is really struggling. He hasn’t got the updates because he hasn’t really performed as well as might have been expected.

But nevertheless, the pressure that’s put on all these drivers to get out there and put in a lap is showing, and that’s where I think a lot of these mistakes are coming from.

Remembering a heated exchange from 20 years ago

When I was referring to the great job that Christian Horner has done, in the early 2000s, F1 was called the “Piranha Club” for good reasons.

You couldn’t envisage today that you would have a situation like Canada 2003, where the FIA press conference is attended by one person – me. And I’m told that the press conference has got to go ahead, just get up there and explain whatever you want.

And there was no sign of anyone else – they were all having a meeting with Bernie Ecclestone – and then, seven minutes into the press conference, most of the other team principals and Bernie all turned up, and we had a very, very interesting press conference [about the withdrawal of a proposed cash windfall to Minardi from F1’s larger teams].

The FIA gave me the official transcript at the end of it, which I’ve still got. It’s got such interesting comments in there from the likes of Eddie Jordan and Ron Dennis.

It was so bad that they pulled the international feed five minutes into the press conference for fear of what might have been said! A few history-making things happened that day.

Gremlins in the Montreal CCTV

It’s worth mentioning the debacle in FP1 on Friday over the cameras. I hope they sorted that out and we never see that again. That was disappointing for the hundreds of millions around the world that are watching on live TV, to see an entire session virtually wiped out for the sake of some CCTV.

We all know computer glitches can happen, but the television feed was perfectly adequate to know where every car was right throughout the session. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen again.