Who made the list of winners and losers from the weekend of the 2024 Formula One Japanese Grand Prix?
Following the Japanese Grand Prix, the next Formula 1 race will take place in China on April 21. The race in Miami on May 5th will follow.
After his dominant (what else would it be?) victory at Suzuka, Max Verstappen has now won 22 of the 26 races since the 2023 season began.
If he prevails in F1’s return to Shanghai (which would require a bold individual to wager against it at this juncture), he will have only lost twice in a calendar year, dating back to Sergio Perez’s triumph in Azerbaijan on April 30, 2023.
The run was only surpassed by Alberto Ascari, who won all nine Grands Prix that he entered between June 1952 and June 1953. The 1953 Indianapolis 500 was disregarded because F1 drivers tended not to bother with the cost and inconvenience of traveling to the Brickyard for a month.
The Verstappen-Red Bull dynasty will soon challenge the legendary duos of Clark-Lotus, Senna-McLaren, Schumacher-Ferrari, and Hamilton-Mercedes. It is dominance on a level rarely seen in motorsports.
However, as regular readers of this article will observe, sometimes a crushing win is insufficient to earn a spot among the Winners. It would have been different if Verstappen had made a mistake during his pit stop, for instance, and lost forty-five seconds before winning by the 12.5 seconds he did.
Thus, we begin our round-up with the driver who drove flawlessly throughout the weekend.
Verstappen equals Schumacher’s achievement in Japan following early drama involving red flags.
Sergio Perez was the winner.
After four races, Sergio Perez has three second-place finishes to go along with Verstappen’s three victories.
With 141 points, nearly twice as many as third-place McLaren, he is comfortably up to second in the Drivers’ standings as the team appears to have already secured the Constructors’ championship.
When facing the future quadruple world champion, Perez’s positions in qualifying and the race are about as good as they get, all else being equal. He was behind Verstappen by 0.066 seconds and 12.5 seconds, respectively.
He may have approached 2024 with a new perspective, realizing that he cannot and will not defeat Verstappen and preparing himself for the abundance of podium finishes and occasional victories that may befall him.
Red Bull CEO Christian Horner has taken note of his improved performance, and he is the clear favorite to hold the position come 2025.
This was about as strong a comeback as it gets from the horror that was Suzuka six months ago.
Right now, Williams Williams is a team that needs to survive.
They only had two for the first races due to delays in the chassis build, and both of them experienced significant crashes over the weekend.
This follows the incident in Australia where Logan Sargeant was benched following Alex Albon’s weekend car write-off.
The team is in need of a break, which fortunately came when team manager James Vowles disclosed that Albon’s chassis damage from the Daniel Ricciardo accident could be fixed and that it was primarily cosmetic in nature.
To make matters worse for Williams, RB added another point (more on that later), bringing their total to seven points, while Williams remained scoreless.
Williams and Vowles will be hoping for a change in fortune as the new chassis is scheduled for Miami.
Right now, the most notable driver of 2024 is the man without a job for 2025.
Just when he needs to put himself in the biggest shop window he can find, Carlos Sainz has had his best start to an F1 season with three races and three podiums, including a win.
Turn one saw Sainz execute a pinpoint move to steal a podium from an uncharacteristically out-of-tune teammate, Charles Leclerc, as he continued to tap into his rich vein of form.
Possibly freed from the pressure at Ferrari, Sainz is dominating and forcefully forced Leclerc to follow him as he guided the Prancing Horse to its first-ever podium at Suzuka.
That 2025 seat decision will get increasingly difficult if he continues in this manner.
Daniel Ricciardo, like the team whose car he forced out of the race, is a driver in need of a break.
Even though Yuki Tsunoda outqualified him once more, finishing 11th to the home hero’s 10th, they both got stuck at the beginning on their medium tires.
As Ricciardo described it, the two were “gobbled” up or swamped, which resulted in the collision with Albon at Turn 3.
Although multiple replays from different angles showed that Ricciardo’s wandering across the track, especially on the first lap, was at best clumsy, the stewards concluded that it was a racing incident of the type that occurred on the first lap.
The stewards brought up the fact that Lance Stroll would have received a penalty if he hadn’t been present and it hadn’t been the first lap.
For China, RB is bringing in a new chassis, so it’s more of a coincidence that he’ll get one, but Ricciardo could use a little extra push after his victory in 2018.
Tsunoda secured the top spot among drivers outside the top five teams for the second consecutive race, earning another merited point.
Tsunoda is 11th in the standings and has seven of the 11 points that Alpine, Stake, Williams, RB, and Haas have scored thus far. This is the best result that any of these five teams can reasonably expect.
Before the weekend, Tsunoda made note of the difficulties drivers occasionally face when handling media and fan attention during home events. Nevertheless, he gave a strong performance.
Despite his sluggish start, he managed to sneak into Q3 once more when Stroll opened up a space, and he easily saw off Nico Hulkenberg for the winning point.
After qualifying, Tsunoda talked about how his increasing maturity and self-assurance behind the wheel were allowing him to work with his engineers to unlock more performance.
It’s about time for a driver who is in his fourth season; he has plenty of potential suitors even if it might not be enough for a Red Bull seat.
McLaren finished two-three at Suzuka six months ago, at a track where its advantages were most likely apparent.
Lando Norris was second, 19.387 seconds behind Verstappen; however, he was fifth, some 29.700 seconds behind, today.
Season after season, McLaren was not expecting that kind of progress, and the team—and Norris in particular—had an uneventful weekend.
He was largely pleased with the MCL38’s appearance in the limited running after Friday and placed it third on the grid (or first in the non-Red Bull class) for the race.
However, he said after the race that the team was in a downward spiral and that Ferrari should have won.
Although the team finds itself in third place in the Constructors’ standings after Mercedes faltered once more and Aston Martin is left with just one driver earning significant, consistent points, that is not progress and represents a step backward for the team.
F1 STANDINGS 2024
| # | DRIVER | POINTS |
|---|---|---|
| 1 |
  |
77 |
| 2 |
  |
64 |
| 3 |
  |
59 |
| 4 |
  |
55 |
| 5 |
  |
37 |
| 6 |
  |
32 |
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