Max Verstappen added to his ever-growing list of Formula 1 achievements at the British Grand Prix, but his team mate Sergio Perez had the indignity of being knocked out in Q1.
Perez has only reached Q3 four times in 10 attempts so far during 2023, and he has an average starting position of 14.6 from the last five grands prix after he qualified 15th for a second successive weekend at Silverstone.
That’s the worst qualifying form for a Red Bull driver since 2007, when David Coulthard had an average starting position of 14.8 over the European, Hungarian, Turkish, Italian and Belgian grands prix. While Red Bull have won every race so far this season, in 2007 they were yet to score their first victory, and peaked with a single third place that year.
Verstappen took pole, the 27th of his career, with McLaren’s Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri qualifying second and third. It was Norris’s third front row start, ending a 39-race wait since the 2021 Russian Grand Prix for McLaren to make the front row, and was rookie Piastri’s best ever starting position for a grand prix. It marked the first time two McLarens had started in the top three since the 2021 Italian Grand Prix.
Norris overtook Verstappen on the opening lap, thrilling the Silverstone crowd. It was the third time Norris has led an F1 race, and he surpassed a career milestone of 200 kilometres in the lead before Verstappen got back past. That marked the 161st race that Red Bull have led, putting them above Lotus into fifth place in the all-time list, and by staying up front to the finish Verstappen helped Red Bull surpass 29,500km led since they joined F1 in 2005.
The victory was Verstappen’s sixth in a row. There have only been four longer winning streaks in F1 history. He matched former Red Bull driver Sebastian Vettel with his 11th consecutive podium. Only Michael Schumacher, Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso have had longer uninterrupted runs on the podium, and of those Schumacher is the only one to have exceeded Verstappen’s tally of ten podiums since the start of a season. More significantly it was Red Bull’s 11th win in a row, meaning they have matched McLaren’s long-standing record from 1988.
With only a few laps run behind the Safety Car, it was the fastest British GP since 2019. Verstappen’s average speed was 215.424kph, which made it the second-fastest race of 2023 so far.
Other milestones Verstappen reached included a 29th consecutive finish, which is the seventh-longest run in F1 history, the 26th fastest lap of his career, his 150th race with Red Bull (the joint fourth-longest association between a driver and a team), an Ayrton Senna-matching seventh win of the year from pole and an eighth career hat-trick putting him joint-fifth in the all-time list with Alain Prost and Vettel.
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While Verstappen has now been on the podium more often than not in F1, Norris’s second place finish was only his seventh podium in 92 starts. That put him level with the podium tallies of Luigi Musso, Pedro Rodriguez and Johnny Herbert, and put McLaren on the podium for the first time since the 2022 Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.
Further down the order, Williams’ Alexander Albon qualified and finished eighth. The four points he scored lifted the team from ninth to seventh in the constructors’ standings. They last held that position after the season-opener, when Albon scored the first of Williams’ 11 points to date in 2023, but before that their last appearance in the top seven was in 2017.
It also marked the team’s best result on home soil since 2015, as only four times since 2005 has a Williams car finished higher than eighth at the British Grand Prix.
Other teams had less to celebrate, including Mercedes who despite surpassing 7,000 points scored as a constructor in F1 and being the only team other than Red Bull to have won in the last 12 months had a car that was not competitive in qualifying and led to Hamilton’s starting from seventh, his worst qualifying result at home since 2012.
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The timing of the Safety Car helped lift Hamilton to third in the race. That meant there were two drivers from the United Kingdom on the British GP podium for the first time since 1999.
Alonso‘s seventh place on Sunday (on his 365th start) means Aston Martin’s best British GP result continues to be Roy Salvadori’s sixth place in 1959, and team mate Lance Stroll’s 14th place finish means he is now ninth on the all-time list for most F1 races without a win. Verstappen, Hamilton and Alonso are the only drivers to have scored in every grand prix this year.
Behind Alonso and Albon were the two Ferraris, marking the first time the Scuderia has been off the British GP podium since 2016 and their worst showing at the race since 2010 when their cars finished 14th and 15th.
Alfa Romeo dropped from eighth to ninth in the constructors’ standings with their second point-less weekend in a row, being jumped by Williams. Having headed to Silverstone 20 points behind McLaren, they left it 50 points in arrears.
Have you spotted any other interesting stats and facts from the British Grand Prix? Share them in the comments.
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