US Grand Prix conclusions: Red Bull’s bibgate saga and Sergio Perez to jump?

Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc claimed his third victory of the F1 2024 season in the United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of The Americas in Austin, Texas.

Leclerc took advantage of a scuffle between Max Verstappen and Lando Norris at the start to take the lead, with Ferrari team-mate Carlos Sainz second and Verstappen third after a penalty for Norris. Here are our conclusions from Austin…

Conclusions from the 2024 United States Grand Prix

Has the autumn break saved Red Bull’s season?

Let’s just get to half time.

That’s what teams in ball sports tell themselves when they’re struggling, the plan is faltering and it seems nothing is going right.

Half time, the interval, becomes the saviour, a brief yet crucial window for the team to take a step back, reorganise and apply fundamental change rather than just papering over the cracks.

Red Bull had been crying out for half time for some months this year, ever since Max Verstappen struck that magic bollard while leading the Miami Grand Prix – the moment upon which the complexion of the F1 2024 season took a strange turn and the fastest car on the grid suddenly belonged to McLaren instead.

They have been more reliant on Verstappen’s genius lately than any self-respecting F1 team would ideally like, aware of the problems with the RB20 but without the space and time to properly address them in the midst of a breathless streak of double and triple headers.

The summer break? That offered a form of respite, but the enforced factory closure was always likely to limit what Red Bull could do about their stalling season.

It is why the rare F1 2024 autumn break of a month between the Singapore and United States grands prix, the same length as the summer shutdown but without the same working restrictions, may have just come to Red Bull’s rescue.

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If there was ever a team who were going to put that extra ‘time off’ to maximum use, it was Red Bull.

They may have lost Adrian Newey and lost their way with development over the course of F1 2024 – guilty, as technical director Pierre Waché exclusively told PlanetF1.com in July, of piling on the downforce without giving enough consideration to the car’s driveability – but one thing Red Bull have never lost is their composure.

It is in the shadows over the last three weeks when all those years of knowledge, expertise and battle-hardened experience of competing for and winning World Championships, of blocking out the noise and troubleshooting and resolving the car’s issues, would have come to the fore.

One last push. One. Last. Push.

It showed over the Austin weekend, at least once the much-ado-about-nothing drama of ‘bibgate’ – one of those classic confected F1 tech rows that flare up in a tight season as teams try to gain the slightest little advantage, milked by McLaren for all it was worth – had died down.

The RB20 was arguably in a better place than at any time since Verstappen ran wide and unearthed (awakened?) the enchanted bollard during F1’s last trip to the USA in May, leading Max to quip that it felt “a bit like old times” after converting pole into victory in the sprint race.

Is it perfect? Far from it. Only just good enough for the podium on the day as it turned out.

And maybe, yes, the time has come to accept that it never will be quite as flawless as it once was.

But it is better, Red Bull saved by the bell and rediscovering their performance in the fast corners without losing balance in the slower stuff.

It is good enough, in other words. Enough for a driver of Max’s calibre to do the rest from here. That’s all he needs right now.

The bleeding has stopped, the way forward has been established.

Now to finish the job.

It’s not too late for Sergio Perez to jump before he’s pushed

Sergio Perez may not have appreciated the presence of Daniel Ricciardo at Red Bull over the last couple of years, but he sure is missing him now.

The great benefit of having Daniel around, Perez came to realise, is that he had another ageing, inconsistent and uninspiring driver with whom to share the burden and face weekly questions over his future.

Who, for instance, really noticed – or cared – in Singapore that Perez was beaten by a Haas and finished marginally ahead of a Williams, driven by someone competing in just his third grand prix, when the world was pre-occupied with trying to get a confession from Ricciardo that it was all over?

Now Daniel is gone, Sergio has lost his human shield and the pressure baton has been placed back in his hands. No obvious takers on the grid anymore.

Perez flatly denied over the autumn break the now-traditional rumour that he and Red Bull have been planning to announce his retirement at his home race in Mexico next weekend, which would at least have guaranteed him a dignified exit.

Yet who’s to say he will have much say in the matter?

The two-year contract extension Perez signed in June is widely believed to contain stricter performance clauses, one of which gave Red Bull the freedom to replace him at the time of the summer break as he was in excess of 100 points adrift of Max Verstappen.

PlanetF1.com revealed in July that Perez came close – exceptionally so – to losing his seat following the Belgian Grand Prix, to the point that Red Bull had even arranged a shootout test between Ricciardo and Liam Lawson at Imola to help inform a decision on his replacement, before the team had a change of heart in the 24 hours after Spa.

If the option was there to drop Perez at the mid-season stage, it would come as some surprise if a similar mechanism – with his deficit to Verstappen having since ballooned to 204 (!) points and counting – does not exist to allow Red Bull to make a change over the winter ahead of F1 2025.

Why else, after all, would VCARB stop short of confirming Lawson for next season after dropping Ricciardo? Why the delay? What possible reason would there be to wait?

With Christian Horner hinting at a “bigger picture” at play and Red Bull “desperately needing answers”, the only plausible explanation is that a strong end to the season will see Lawson emerge as a serious alternative to Perez for next year.

Horner remarked ahead of the weekend that Lawson’s engine penalty made his first race back a “soft landing”, but soft landings do not exist in a Red Bull environment in which Lawson confessed to feeling “judged” even during test outings this year.

His one-lap pace did not go unnoticed, with Helmut Marko telling PlanetF1.com on Friday that Lawson “did a very good job” to go marginally faster than Yuki Tsunoda in the first stage of sprint qualifying, before he produced the performance of a Red Bull Racing driver in waiting – remarkably unfazed and beautifully polished – to finish ninth from last on the grid.

And if his five-race cameo of mid-2023 is anything to go by, he will only keep getting better from here, proving the VCARB a faster car than Tsunoda and Ricciardo have made it look all season.

Will Perez see the writing on the wall here and have the sense to jump before he’s pushed?

Still he says he will not walk away, but just days out from the Mexican GP it’s not too late to change his mind – or for Red Bull to persuade him to change his mind.

It could determine whether he gloriously departs the F1 stage as King of Mexico, or follows Ricciardo out the back door.

Cheer up, Lewis Hamilton: At least the Ferrari looks good

It is at this time of year, with the end of the season in sight, that drivers on the move for the following year are routinely accused of “checking out” of their existing teams.

And who could blame them? With relatively little to fight for, it is only human nature that thoughts begin to turn to the future and more important battles to come.

Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes will doubtlessly insist that their bond is as strong as it ever was and that they remain as committed to each other as they always were.

And that they will remain so until – and even slightly beyond – the moment the chequered flag falls in Abu Dhabi seven weeks from now.

Didn’t look quite that way this weekend, though.

With the conclusion of his Mercedes career coming into view, Hamilton has grown increasingly emotional in recent months, marking such relatively minor landmark moments as the last time he used his private room in the team’s hospitality unit at Monza, the final European race of the season.

In Austin, a place where they have enjoyed such success and closed out so many title battles in the past, this time Hamilton looked almost troubled. Disengaged, even.

Having never started lower than fifth at the Circuit of The Americas previously, 19th on Saturday represented Hamilton’s worst qualifying result since he crashed while coming down from the thrill of sealing his fourth World Championship at Brazil 2017.

And then, just three laps into the race, came the most uncharacteristic of Lewis Hamilton mistakes as he lost the rear at Turn 19 and spun into retirement.

The flag-waving joy of Silverstone, and the end of his 945-day winless run, suddenly feels a very long time ago.

Oh well, he might have allowed himself to think as he peered down at the rear tyre of his beached W15 with his hand on his hip, at least the Ferrari looks good.

Ferrari were one of the few teams who decided against bringing upgrades to the United States GP, anxious to learn if their improvement since the summer break was real or whether the car was flattered by the Monza/Baku/Singapore trilogy.

The evidence is highly encouraging, for on a weekend Red Bull were tentatively re-emerging from their mid-season slump and the McLaren was outside of its recent irresistible window (taking a little time to optimise its own latest upgrades, maybe?), it transpired that Ferrari were the ones with the dominant car.

The effortlessness of Charles Leclerc’s eighth career victory – his third win of the year means 2024 now stands as his joint most productive season to date with five races still to go – would have been very reassuring for Hamilton as he watched on.

Even if he won’t admit it, there have surely been fleeting moments since that day at Silverstone when Hamilton has asked himself whether he really is doing the right thing by leaving Mercedes.

A day like this, though, will only convince him that it is a decision he will not regret.

Lando Norris is not the only British driver with a questionable temperament

The only mistake Helmut Marko made when discussing Lando Norris’s limitations was to use the term “mental weaknesses.”

Why?

Because that rather innocent phraseology gave Zak Brown the licence to play the mental health card, which he duly did in describing Marko’s comments as in “poor taste” and “disappointing but not surprising” to media including PlanetF1.com in Friday’s team principals’ press conference.

Brown may like to complain about the “nasty” tactics employed by Red Bull and protest that McLaren compete with a cleaner conscience.

But to conflate the two issues – genuine mental health issues and an observation of the mindset of an elite athlete – was as predictable as it was cynical. Shameful, in fact.

It would be foolish in the extreme to pretend that resilience and an ability to withstand pressure are not key attributes for even the most moderately successful athletes.

And if we are not allowed to scrutinise these elements in the same way we analyse such other fundamentals as technique and physical fitness, then we are well and truly lost.

The hard, uncomfortable truth is that since he first gained access to a winning car in F1, stretching all the way back to the Russian Grand Prix of 2021, Norris’s temperament – a better word, a safer word – has been highly questionable.

It was there once again for the world to see in Austin, Lando a little too accommodating of Verstappen at the start – just as he had been with Oscar Piastri on the opening lap at Monza.

And again in the closing laps of the race when his attempts to overtake Max lacked a certain conviction and incisiveness – just as they had in Austria prior to the collision – until he started getting desperate and passed him off the circuit, only succeeding in earning himself a time penalty.

It should not be considered taboo, or somehow beyond the realms of rational and reasonable debate, to suggest that Norris must toughen up if he is to ever realise his potential.

Yet Norris is not the only British driver with a weakness in this area, for the United States GP weekend also once again captured George Russell – very much the opposite of Lando, yet equally vulnerable, when it comes to mentality – as his own worst enemy.

Russell and Mercedes may have complained about the penalty he incurred for overtaking Valtteri Bottas, yet the simple matter is that he should never have been in a position where he was racing a Sauber wheel to wheel in Austin.

Following his victory in Austria in July, Russell conceded that his “risk/reward dial” is not always where it should be in a reference to his untidy performance in Canada, where in his desperation to bring a victory to Mercedes he made too many mistakes.

Too often Russell’s self-confidence and ambition – his utter determination to impose himself on every given scenario – have bled into recklessness and contributed to his undoing.

His Saturday in Texas, where he faded badly in the sprint after once again pushing his tyres too hard, too soon before crashing out of qualifying hours later as he tried to bend the car to his will, was poorly judged and painfully self-defeating.

Where once these rash mistakes could be brushed off as the naivety of youth, increasingly – as he enters the final 12 months of his current Mercedes contract and the team continue to be linked with Max Verstappen – they carry a career-limiting danger.

It is not too hard to imagine a scenario in 2025 of Russell – already, with a driving style on the spikier side of the spectrum, more susceptible to mistakes than most – becoming ever scrappier and error-prone as the pressure on his seat builds, until he self-destructs and ends up condemning himself to a career in midfield obscurity.

For a long time it seemed that Russell, even if slightly less gifted than Norris, would be the one to go further in Formula 1, owing to his relationship with Mercedes-Benz and his greater sense of certainty.

The more that both of these drivers are placed under examination, however, the more cracks are discovered and the more suspicions arise.

Perhaps neither will be the heir to Hamilton after all.

The sprint format has never felt more unwelcome

It seemed quite clear what Formula 1 was up to in the early years of the sprint format, doubling from one season to the next the number of sprint weekends from three to six.

It is well established in the world of behavioural science that people tend to become more receptive to something the more they are gradually exposed to it until, eventually, what started off as an unpopular idea is not merely tolerated, but becomes the accepted norm.

With the sport’s stakeholders, executives and television pundits high on the Kool-Aid – all relentlessly pushing the belief that the sprint format was the best invention since carbon fibre, despite the clear resistance of fans from the very beginning – it felt inevitable that the amount of sprints would keep increasing.

And keep on increasing.

Right until, before anyone knew it, half the races on the calendar – maybe all of them – were sprint weekends.

And who knows? That still might be the plan, but the sprint has never felt more intrusive and unwelcome than it does today.

The structure of the F1 2024 calendar has done the format no favours in that regard, with the United States GP the first sprint weekend since Austria almost five months ago.

The novelty has worn off.

And with the title fight simmering nicely between Verstappen and Norris, Red Bull and McLaren, the back-loaded sprint calendar (two are still to come in Brazil and Qatar) has rendered the sprint an unwanted, unnecessary complication at this stage of the season.

Sorry, remind me again: what exactly are the tyre rules for sprint qualifying? And why is Martin Brundle shouting so loudly about a race worth only eight points for the winner? And whose bright idea was it to only hand points down to P8 anyway?

What’s the point of all this? What is the point indeed.

Following the first sprint weekend of the season in China, Fernando Alonso claimed that it is “better not to race” in the sprint after being forced on to an unusual strategy during the grand prix due to a lack of hard tyres – a direct result of a puncture he suffered during the mini race.

Those concerns, surely, will only expand at this typically nervous stage of the season when potentially pivotal engine penalties are never far away and teams aim to keep mileage to a minimum.

Alonso, of course, stressed that he and Aston Martin would “obviously” not elect to withdraw from a sprint – despite creating “a game of who can run less” in the only practice session – when the opportunity exists to score points and collect data ahead of the main race on Sunday.

Yet you can see why the temptation would exist for some in certain circumstances.

It would require drastic action of that nature to finally open eyes to the true worthlessness of the sprint and, with any luck, signal the end of an error.

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