Analysis: Things we learned from the opening stages of the season

Seven of the 23 grands prix are done and dusted with the season having been dominated by Red Bull Racing and double world champion Max Verstappen. Before the action gets underway in Montreal this weekend, F1Technical’s Balázs Szabó picks outs a few key lessons we have learned so far in this season.

Seven of seven – Red Bull Racing have won every single race so far this season with Max Verstappen adding five victories to his tally and his teammate Sergio Perez stealing the win in Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan.

Red Bull achieved its biggest winning margin in Bahrain where Max Verstappen crossed the line 38.637s in front of the third-placed Fernando Alonso who was the closest non-Red Bull driver. The ominous sign that underlines Red Bull’s dominance in the current season is that the closest anyone came the winning team was Alonso, but he was also 20.728s adrift of the winning Red Bull of Sergio Perez in Saudi Arabia.

In fact, the closest margin was registered in Australia where seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton crossed the finish line only 0.179s behind Verstappen, but Round 3 of the 2023 F1 season ended behind safety car, making the result less representative.

Records – Red Bull Racing and Max Verstappen continue to rack up records. With his Barcelona victory, Verstappen recorded his third grand slam win (from pole, leading every lap and taking fastest lap) while his 40th career put him only one short of Ayrton Senna for fifth in the all-time list.

In trouble – Ferrari endured a very difficult start to their season following their eye-watching performance last season that saw the Scuderia emerge as the fastest team in the opening stages of the season.

Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc are only sixth and seventh in the Drivers’ Championship while Ferrari have not only fallen behind Red Bull, but they have been slowly dropping behind Mercedes and Aston Martin with the gap having grown to 52 points to the second-placed Anglo-German outfit.

Yet to score – Two of the three rookies are yet to score points in their debut season. Nyck de Vries scored a 12th finish at the Monaco Grand Prix as his best result in 2023 while Logan Sargeant finished the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix in P12, but has been unable to improve on this position since.

No retirements – The 2023 F1 season saw two – seemingly – incident-free races with the Miami and the Spanish Grands Prix having been taken place without a single retirement. Moreover, there were no yellow flags, no Safety Cars and no red flags in these grands prix. By contrast, the Australian Grand Prix's three red flags marked it as the most-stopped race in F1's 73 years.

Fastest laps – Max Verstappen has set the fastest race lap on three occasions in the opening seven races ( Saudi Arabia, Miami, Spain), while his teammate Sergio Perez recorded the fastest race lap in Australia. The opening grand prix in Manama saw Alfa Romeo’s Zhou Guanyu recorded the fastest race lap while Mercedes drivers George Russell and Lewis Hamilton secured this honour in Azerbaijan and Monaco respectively.

Despite the heavier tyres, tyre changes have hardly become slower than in the past. The fatsest tyre change was performed by Red Bull when the Milton Keynes-based outfit changes tyres on Sergio Perez’s car in Barcelona within 2.07s, but Ferrari’s overall best tyre change conducted in Jeddah was only 0.03s slower.

New compounds – Formula One’s sole tyre supplier Pirelli introduced a new compound for this year with last year’s hardest compound C1 having become the C0 while a new 2023-spec C1 has been introduced as an all-new product.

So far, Pirelli has not used the hardest C0 compound, but used the trio of C1-C2-C3 compounds in Bahrain and Spain. The trio of C2-C3-C4 has been in action three times – Saudi Arabia, Australia and Miami - while the three softest compounds have made appearance in two rounds – Azerbaijan, Monaco.

No blanket – With the sport adamant to phase out tyre heaters in the near future, Pirelli has introduced a new wet weather tyre that doesn't need to be heated in blankets. The new specification was set to make its debut at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, but the cancellation of the Imola round meant that it was postponed to Monaco where three drivers could try the new tyres out in the rain-soaked race.

A new sprint format – Following its introduction back in 2021, the sprint format has been gone through key modifications. It is slated to be run at six Grands Prix in 2023, compared to three in 2021 and 2022.

The new schedule for sprint events consists of a single practice session on Friday, followed by the qualifying session which determines the grid for the Sunday's Grand Prix. On Saturday, a new qualifying session called "sprint shootout", in place of the old second practice session, is run, determining the grid for the sprint while the Grand Prix takes place on Sunday.

The Azerbaijan Grand Prix saw the season's first sprint event with Charles Leclerc having secured pole position ahead of Verstappen and Pérez. With the help of Red Bull straight-line advantage, Perez won the sprint event. The next weekend sporting the sprint format will be the Austrian Grand Prix.

No new record – Although the season was expected to set a new record with a calendar that features 24 races. However, the Chinese Grand Prix was cancelled for the fourth consecutive year due to the ongoing difficulties presented by the COVID-19 pandemic in the country.

The Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, which was scheduled to take place on 21 May as the sixth round of the championship, was called off on 17 May due to flooding in the area. It means that the 2023 F1 championship will be contested over 22 races.