01 December 2023 , 01:00
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Mercedes chief Toto Wolff conceded Max Verstappen was the only driver who maximised his car's potential this year.
The Dutchman ended the season with a frighteningly dominant record. He won 19 of the 22 races and finished lower than second just once, on a rare off-weekend for Red Bull at the Singapore Grand Prix, when he still scored points in fifth.
Teammate Sergio Perez was nowhere near his level and scored fewer than half the number of points over the course of the year. The likes of Mercedes and Ferrari didn't have the cars to compete with Verstappen and saw performance swings from their drivers.
Wolff saw peaks and troughs in the performances of both his drivers. Lewis Hamilton scored strongly in the first half of the season but ended the campaign horribly, while George Russell never found the consistency which characterised his first year as a Mercedes driver.
Only Verstappen, the Austrian admits, produced his best form. "It's difficult to comprehend that good drivers in various teams have these oscillations of performance," he said. "You've seen it this [in Abu Dhabi] with [Carlos] Sainz and [Charles] Leclerc, you've seen it with George and Lewis, Oscar [Piastri] and Lando [Norris].
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"And the obvious one is Perez and Verstappen. Perez is not a second slower than Max. So, what is that? We have seen it swinging in both directions. So fundamentally, I think it's all around the tyre grip. If you are able to have the car in a sweet spot, a stable platform that you start the work with the beginning of the weekend, then you can extract performance.
"I think if you're not, there's just no performance. You're falling off the cliff, literally. So I have no explanation for that. I think the only one this year who has understood how to drive these tyres is Max."
His Ferrari counterpart Frederic Vasseur agreed with that assessment. The Frenchman saw his drivers swap places in the championship several times over the course of the year, only for a wretched end to the Sainz's season to open the door for Leclerc to leapfrog him and finish six points ahead of the Spaniard.
"I think it's true that the Carlos was very, vey strong after the summer break and Charles was flying in the last six or seven events," said Vasseur. "But, overall, I think the evaluation that we had into the team was a good one.
"It was true for every single team except Max - everybody on the grid had up-and-down during the season. It's very, very tight so sometimes for one tenth [of a second] or one tenth and a half, because you like the track or you like the set-up of the car on the day, you can move from P2-P3 to P10 and then it's almost a disaster."