Written by Owen Bradley
Credit: Mark Thompson
Max Verstappen has matched Sebastian Vettel's Consecutive Victory record, of winning nine races in a row. Vettel achieved this with Red Bull Racing back in 2013, and a decade later, Verstappen has matched that record at his home race in Zandvoort, but it wasn''t exactly the easiest of races.
During the race, Verstappen also has now led over 600 laps so far this season, and is around 100 laps shy of matching or beating Vettel's record of most laps led in a season, with 739 laps. It has become incredibly clear to see, Max Verstappen is having a record-shattering season in 2023.
Verstappen's remarkable achievement in 2023, of winning nine races in a row, was done in incredible fashion, because the Dutch Grand Prix was a very difficult race for a number of drivers. Right on the first lap, the rain started to come down very quickly and it really threw a spanner in the works for many many drivers, as team decided to box around half the field, which left the pack with split strategies and a lot of people trying the undercut whilst the track got more damp.
As the circuit got even wetter, Verstappen came into the pits, but was jumped by Sergio Perez in the pit stops, which made for an interesting inter-team strategy battle. As Verstappen closed up to Perez very quickly, Red Bull boxed Verstappen onto the Soft compound tyres, which led to a lot of controversy as Perez was actually the leading car, and therefore this meant Verstappen snatched the lead back from his teammate through strategy.
As the conditions got much trickier, Perez had spun at the first corner, along with multiple others such as, Lewis Hamilton, Valterri Bottas and Guanyu Zhou too, who would end up fully crashing out of the race.
Credit: Lars Baron
With the race Red-Flagged and it becoming slightly unclear as to whether we would get restarted, we eventually did about 40 minutes later. Verstappen managed to just stay ahead of Fernando Alonso, who went on to finish in P2 and an extraordinary podium in such a difficult race. Sergio Perez' race would go from bad to worse, as he picked up a post-race 5-second penalty. This demoted Perez to 4th, as Pierre Gasly achieved another podium for Alpine.
It was an absolutely spectacular first race back from the summer break, and a race which will go down in history as one of the best, certainly for the 2023 season.
And so, another dominant performance from Max Verstappen, who matches the consecutive win record, and will absolutely be looking to set a new record, at the Italian Grand Prix next weekend.
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