“That’s all the highlights? That’s all that happened in that race?” Oscar Piastri wondered aloud in the cool-down room after finishing third at the Japanese Grand Prix.
The podium-getters had just been treated to an extremely brief best-of compilation of the preceding 82 soporific minutes of racing, and the Australian was saying what every viewer had surely been thinking.
“For a race that felt like it was pretty flat-out, nothing happened.”
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Despite the spectacle of the iconic Suzuka Circuit and despite the top three being split by just 2.129 seconds, round 3 of the championship made for a grim afternoon of viewing for all those not predisposed to the Dutch national anthem.
Statisticians recorded just 15 overtakes for the entire day, most of which were executed at the back of the field.
The top six drivers finished where they’d started. Lewis Hamilton finished one place up from his grid spot, moving from eighth to seventh, only because of his car advantage relative to Isack Hadjar’s Racing Bulls machine.
In fact 11 of the 20 starters took the chequered flag in qualifying order.
Of course a race doesn’t necessarily need overtaking to be a thriller. A duel between two cars can still be enthralling even if the pursuer never executes a pass.
Credit must also be paid to Verstappen, who was absolutely perfect defending his unlikely pole position with a flawless Sunday performance. Given his car deficit — albeit smaller this weekend than it has been at other tracks — any even minor mistake could have cost him victory.
But barring a brief an ultimately harmless altercation at pit exit, in Japan there was no real prospect of a move being pulled off among the top three. This was a 53-lap procession.
SUZUKA HAS LONG STRUGGLED TO PRODUCE MEMORABLE RACES
It’s been a long time since Suzuka was a genuinely good race track for Formula 1. While the driving challenge is as fearsome as ever, the bigger, wider and more loaded with downforce these cars get, the more they struggle to race each other around this narrow ribbon of road.
An old school-layout born in the 1960s, the Honda-owned circuit also lacks the sort of long straights and big stops that offer the best chance of overtaking in modern F1.
That said, not every race in Japan is this dull. Often strategy injects some intrigue.
Normally this is a two-stop race. That means not only are there two chances for teams to try to make a difference in the pit lane, but there are different approaches each driver can take with their tyre selections that could influence the outcome.
But the variable of tyre strategy was absent this year, and it was largely down to one seemingly small factor.
Ahead of the grand prix race organisers had partially resurfaced the track. The circuit was resealed from the last chicane, down the front straight, through the esses and all the way to the end of the first sector.
Resurfacing of the first sector in particular had a massive effect. The esses is one of the most demanding sections of racetrack in the world. It’s where the tyres are most punished.
The old abrasive surface made it particularly gruelling, but the new surface is smooth, heavy with bitumen and very grippy — and much kinder on the tyres.
It helped Verstappen to break a track record many had assumed would be unbreakable during qualifying.
Tyre degradation was far, far lower than expected. In fact it was practically non-existent.
“The new tarmac at Suzuka has changed the feature of being a high-degradation circuit; it is now a very low degradation circuit,” McLaren boss Andrea Stella said. “It was a very easy one-stop and not many strategic options.”
Piastri breaks down third place in Japan | 01:50
Low degradation was critical for two reasons.
The first was that this race became an easy one-stop, even with all drivers racing flat-out without much tyre management.
The second was that low degradation made it very difficult to use the tyres to develop a performance offset.
When degradation is higher, drivers with older tyres will be slower than those on newer ones. That opens the door to interesting strategies.
Do you stop first and undercut the driver in front by using your tyre life early?
Do you stay out longer than the drive you’re racing and build an offset, giving yourself a shorter second stint to allow you to push the tyre harder?
But without degradation, the tyres kept performing consistently well throughout the stint, rendering these options unavailable.
There was a further side-effect of the low degradation, and that was that teams were worried that they wouldn’t be able to overtake slower cars even if on new tyres.
Overtaking is always hard around Suzuka, requiring a significant pace advantage to have a reasonable chance of pulling a move.
“On this track you need 0.7 to 0.8 seconds of performance advantage in order to be able to overtake,” Stella said, though some other estimates place the required advantage at twice as much, at 1.4 seconds.
Whatever the case, on average this season the gap between the best and the worst car in qualifying has been 1.25 seconds. The difference between the top three less than 0.4 seconds. Those gaps are smaller in race conditions.
“It was apparent that the degradation was low, so I think if you lose position with a safety car [through pit strategy], it’s lost,” Stella said, explaining why his team wasn’t more creative with its strategy choices. “I don’t think we could have overtaken a Ferrari or a Mercedes today.”
It meant an exciting race was never able to develop.
Norris nearly eats dirt after pit drama | 01:31
BUT DIRTY AIR IS BECOMING A BIGGER PROBLEM
But Suzuka also highlighted a second problem: that the dirty-air effect is becoming more severe.
Dirty air is when turbulence from a leading car negatively affects the aerodynamic performance of a following car.
A key objective of these regulations, introduced in 2022, was to counter this effect. Ground effect aerodynamics were brought back to Formula 1 specifically because they were less sensitive to turbulence.
In their first year the rules appeared to have worked. Now in their fourth season, the benefits appear to have been spent.
“I think dirty air, yes, [is worse] because ultimately we keep adding aerodynamic downforce, which means that the losses are even bigger,” Stella said.
“I think the dirty air is a problem. We have seen this even in China in terms of the Hamilton — when he was in the lead of the sprint he could do pretty much whatever he wanted, even if the tyre had damage.
“The lead is a significant factor. Normally the tyres add to the mix because there are some circuits in which you degrade almost 0.1 seconds per lap, and then if you have better degradation, if you degrade 50 per cent less in 10 laps, you are half a second faster just because you degrade less for the tyres. Here this variable was not working because there was no tyre degradation.
“But I think the dirty air is a factor, and possibly this is one of the reasons why the 2026 regulations may introduce some reset from this point of view, because I think even if this generation of car was conceived to actually improve following — that was what we were talking about in 2022 — there’s been so much aerodynamic development now that again they have become so much of an aerodynamic machine that as soon as you follow you lose the performance.”
Ocon helps Doohan after Japanese GP | 00:31
While the FIA at various points banned developments it felt were contrary to the regulations, some of the bigger loopholes more fundamental to the rules have been allowed to go unchecked and won’t be closed until next season.
But as Stella explained, it’s not just a matter of loopholes being exploited or teams working outside the regulations. It’s also at least in part simply that teams are putting more downforce on the cars.
Let’s say the average F1 car generated 400 points of downforce in 2022 and generates 600 points now.
Let’s also say that an F1 car loses 20 per cent of its aerodynamic performance when around 10 metres behind another car.
In 2022 that would mean a loss of 80 points of downforce. Today it would be a loss of 120 points.
But we know that cars are losing much more than 20 per cent by now. Today that number could be closer to 240 points of lost downforce.
That leads to a big performance disparity between the following car and the leading car that makes overtaking difficult.
Then throw into the mix that losing downforce will inevitably cause the tyres to slide, overheat and lose performance, and you can understand why overtaking is becoming exponentially more difficult.
Max fends off McLaren to claim Japan GP! | 02:21
‘QUALI CHAMPIONSHIP’
So where does that leave us?
The 2026 regulations will deliver dramatically different cars that will develop 30 per cent less downforce and more than 50 per cent less drag. That alone will make a big difference to overtaking from the aerodynamic point of view.
Right now, however, it leaves qualifying as the most important session of the weekend.
So far this season we’ve had three different pole sitters, all of whom have gone on to win the grand prix — Lando Norris in Australia, Oscar Piastri in China and Max Verstappen in Japan. Lewis Hamilton also won the Shanghai sprint from pole.
In Australia the podium getters would have finished where they started had Piastri not spun off the road.
In China the only swap among the top three was Norris passing George Russell for second.
As mentioned, the top six on the grid finished where they started in Japan.
“The race was won yesterday [in qualifying] in hindsight,” Norris said after the race. “I guess we always kind of know the better position you start, the more chance you have of winning.
“I’m sure like if you put a George [Russell, for example] starting on pole today, I think he probably still would have won the race.
“I think anytime someone does that bit of a better job on Saturday for qualifying, they can have those opportunities come their way.
“I think our pace was probably slightly better but not enough to get through the dirty air, kind of get into the DRS — and then passing is a whole other story because it’s pretty much impossible to pass here.”
New angle of doohan’s HUGE crash | 00:10
Ferrari boss Frédéric Vasseur said the closeness of the pack, combined with all the factors above, risked having the season decided more by qualifying performance than race results.
“It will be a quali championship,” he said.
“The car is very, very sensitive to the clean air and to the dirty air. As soon as you are behind someone, even when it’s three or four seconds, you start to struggle a little bit, to damage more the tyres, to lose consistency.
“I think from one session to the other one, depending on the gap to the car in front of you, you have a different result. It’s very tricky even from stint to stint.
“For sure quali is always crucial to the performance, and the closer you are, the smaller the gap is between cars, it’s even more true, because then you are in a group of cars, it’s not just that you are fighting with the guy in front of you.”
If it’s to be a qualifying championship, then one team is favourite after three circuits.
Average single-lap pace
1. McLaren: +0.004 seconds
2. Red Bull Racing: +0.187 seconds
3. Mercedes: +0.289 seconds
4. Ferrari: +0.394 seconds
But Verstappen proved that he doesn’t need a big mistake from the McLaren drivers to pinch pole.
If it’s to be a qualifying championship, Verstappen has proved that he can be a contender even with an imperfect car.