8 things to watch at the Australian Grand Prix

Photo by Mark Thompson/Getty Images

From the struggles at McLaren to Red Bull’s dominance, here is what to watch this week as F1 returns to Australia

Formula 1 is back this week, with the grid heading to Melbourne for the Australian Grand Prix. As with every week in the F1 world, there is no shortage of storylines to follow during the third race of the season.

From Red Bull’s early dominance to the struggles at McLaren, and even the return of two favorite sons to Australia, here are the things to watch this week.

Can Red Bull continue their dominance?

Since pre-season testing, the Bulls have been minutes ahead of the competition, and right now, those minutes feel like miles. Both Max Verstappen and Sergio Pérez were strong during testing in Bahrain, and they followed that up with a front-row lockout in both qualifying and the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix.

Despite Verstappen’s driveshaft failure during qualifying in Jeddah, which saw him start the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix in 15th position, Red Bull still finished one-two in the second race of the season, with Pérez just ahead of his teammate.

Will that dominance continue Down Under, or will another team — or teams — be able to close the gap?

Or will the internal competition be their undoing?

At this point in the season, that might be the bigger question facing Red Bull.

Because given how other teams might be a few races away from leveling the playing field with the Bulls — George Russell teased recently that Imola in May could be when Mercedes is ready to compete — the biggest challenge for Red Bull might be an internal one.

Currently, the RB19 is the class of the field, and not only has the team atop the Constructors’ Championship, but it has Verstappen and Pérez at the top of the Drivers’ table, separated by a single point. But it is that point that could be cause for concern. As has been discussed, Verstappen posted the fastest lap of the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix on the final lap of the race, leading to some confusion from Pérez after the race, as he thought the team had instructed Verstappen to simply hold pace, and not push at the end.

To put in perspective Verstappen’s final lap, here is his lap-time data from Jeddah, with the data provided by Ergast API:

(Data visualization is apparently not my passion, but I digress.)

That late-stage dip is what we are talking about.

On the final lap of the race, Verstappen posted a lap time of 1:31.906 to secure both the fastest lap time of the Grand Prix and that extra point in the Drivers’ standings. As you can see, it was an impressive lap, the only sub-1.32 lap time he posted during the entire Grand Prix.

Team Principal Christian Horner talked last week about the maturity of both drivers, insisting that the duo will not compromise the team’s success this season. “We’ve got two very mature drivers who work well together; they’ve worked well together previously,” said Horner after the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. “We discussed the race before the race and said, ‘Look, you are free to race today, but the rules of engagement are team first, respect each other, respect the cars that you are driving’. We [wanted] to bring home maximum points and we’ve done that.”

Still, Horner has a monumental task ahead of him. He has to balance both the team’s interest in securing a second-straight Constructors’ Championship between the interests of his two drivers. There is Verstappen, chasing down a third-straight Drivers’ title, while Pérez might be thinking — rightly — that this could be his best shot at a world title.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown.

Can Fernando Alonso and Aston Martin play the ultimate spoilers?

Photo by Dan Istitene – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images

Were it not for Red Bull, Aston Martin and veteran driver Fernando Alonso would be the biggest stories in F1.

Thanks to back-to-back podiums from Alonso to start the season, Aston Martin sits tied with Mercedes in second place in the Constructors’ Championship, and it is Alonso who is in third in the Drivers’ behind the Red Bull duo.

Alonso is now eyeing his third-straight podium, something he has not done since the 2013 season when he secured three-straight second-place finishes in Belgium, Italy, and Singapore.

That season, Alonso finished second in the Drivers’ Championship.

Behind Sebastian Vettel of Red Bull.

Just something to keep in mind.

Is the Mercedes comeback here?

Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff called the Bahrain Grand Prix the team’s “worst day” in racing.

What a difference a Grand Prix makes.

There was a much different mood around the Silver Arrows following the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, which saw Lewis Hamilton finish P5 and Russell come across the line fourth. While there was a brief moment where Russell was on the podium, thanks to a ten-second penalty handed down to Alonso, that penalty was later rescinded, leaving Alonso in third place and dropping Russell down to fourth.

Still, the mood around the team has shifted. Wolff declared that the team was “going in the right direction” after Jeddah, and Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin addressed the team at Mercedes’s Brackley factory and discussed not just the “motivation” around the team, but also the idea that something special could still happen this season.

With developments to the W14 on the horizon — Russell indicated that the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix in May is the current target — perhaps the Mercedes bounceback is on?

What about Ferrari?

Photo by Dan Istitene – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images

While Mercedes left Jeddah on a high note, things were much different around Ferrari.

To say it has been a rocky start to the 2023 campaign for the Scuderia would be an understatement. Charles Leclerc posted a DNF in Bahrain after the control electronics on his SF-23 failed, and when he took his third set of control electronics prior to the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, that forced him to also take a ten-place grid penalty for the race.

Leclerc managed to post the second-fastest time in qualifying, but the penalty forced him to start in P12. Ferrari managed a P6 and P7 in the Grand Prix, with Carlos Sainz Jr. coming in sixth ahead of Leclerc. While the Ferraris were certainly fast for short stints — given’s Leclerc’s qualifying time as well as Sainz qualifying in P4 — longer runs illuminate continued problems for the SF-23.

“[I’m] a bit surprised because after Friday and before the weekend, I thought that we had a chance of being the second force here in Jeddah,” said Sainz after the Grand Prix. “But I think that last stint on the hard proves that we still have a lot of work to do, that we have a weakness in the race and that we need to wait for the developments to come to see if we can improve that weakness.”

Ferrari looked to Jeddah as an opportunity to prove they were the second-fastest team on the grid.

They left Jeddah wondering if they are actually fourth.

Could Alpine make their own move up the table this week?

Were it not for Esteban Ocon’s rough day in Bahrain, we could be looking at a world where Alpine had come away with double points in each of the first two races of the season.

However, they managed the double in Saudi Arabia, with Ocon placing eighth, and Pierre Gasly behind him in ninth. Now Alpine sits fifth in the Constructors’ standings with eight points, double that of Alfa Romeo behind them in sixth.

There are reasons to believe that Alpine is going to put a strong season together, even with Ocon’s foibles in the season opener. Both drivers qualified inside the top ten in Jeddah, and Gasly’s hard charge from starting last in Bahrain to getting in the points shows that they can make up some spots on the track.

Now we can wonder if they can do the same in the standings.

What is happening at McLaren?

Photo by Eric Alonso/Getty Images

This is probably not the homecoming Oscar Piastri imagined.

While the 2023 season has seen a shaky start from Ferrari, it is been a near debacle for McLaren. The team struggled during pre-season testing — with Team Principal Andrea Stella openly wondering if they would set into Q3 on upcoming weekends — and the team currently sits at the bottom of the table having failed to secure a single point.

Piastri suffered a DNF in Bahrain, and his teammate Lando Norris was forced to pit every ten laps or so to manage a pressure leak in the car’s hydraulics. Then in Saudi Arabia, Piastri managed to reach Q3, but contact with Pierre Gasly on the opening lap of the race caused front wing damage and forced an early pit stop for both Piastri and Norris, as debris from Piastri’s MCL60 caused damage to Norris’s car as well.

instead of challenging at the front, the two drivers were locked in battle with Logan Sargeant of Williams for P15 as the race wound down.

Since Jeddah, changes have come to McLaren. The team announced last week the departure of James Key, their former Executive Technical Director, as well as the creation of a new Technical Executive Team. That team includes David Sanchez, who was the Head of Vehicle Concept with Ferrari before departing earlier this season. Sanchez is set to join McLaren at the start of the 2024 calendar year.

It has been a brutal start to the year for McLaren. Perhaps this is the week they begin to turn things around.

The return of Daniel Ricciardo to Australia

Finally, there is one last storyline to watch this weekend, although it concerns matters more off the track.

The return of Daniel Ricciardo to Australia, now as a reserve driver with Red Bull.

Over the past few seasons, Ricciardo has become one of the most well-known figures in motorsport. The success of the Netflix docuseries Drive to Survive has been credited with the growing popularity of F1 around the world — and particularly in the United States — and Ricciardo has been perhaps the biggest single beneficiary of the series’s success.

The first season focused heavily on his decision to leave Red Bull in the first place and sign with Renault for the 2019 season. But after just two years with the French team, Ricciardo was on the move again, making a shocking decision to sign with McLaren.

However, his time with McLaren came to an end last season, as the team moved ahead with Oscar Piastri and parted ways with the fan favorite. Ricciardo did not find a full-time seat for this season and announced a return to Red Bull as the team’s reserve driver for the 2023 campaign.

In that role, Ricciardo assists with simulator work and work at the team’s factory, and helps with the myriad public relations campaigns the team faces as the defending Constructors’ Champions.

Ricciardo announced on social media that he was headed to Melbourne for this week’s Grand Prix, and the team unveiled on Monday morning “Ricciardo’s Homecoming,” a video featuring the driver touring Australia in the RB7, the car Sebastian Vettel drove to the 2011 Drivers’ Championship:

It might be worth keeping an eye on Danny Ric this weekend.