Verstappen eases to victory for troubled Red Bull at opening Bahrain Grand Prix | Formula One

With his Red Bull team in turmoil amid the furore around Christian Horner’s exoneration after a complaint about his behaviour from a female employee, Max Verstappen offered cause for brief but doubtless much-needed relief with a crushingly dominant victory at Formula One’s season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix.

Verstappen kept his head down with admirable calm to deliver with clinical precision amid the clamour, the sound and the fury that has swirled around Red Bull all week. With Horner fighting to save his career, the complete mastery the three-time world champion demonstrated of just how far Red Bull are from their rivals will have added weight to those backing the ­beleaguered team principal.

Indeed, very notably at the Sakhir circuit there were displays of unity all round. Horner’s wife, the former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell-Horner, arrived at the track hand in hand with her husband in a very clear demonstration of solidarity, regardless of how difficult things may be behind the scenes.

Far more important was the arrival in Verstappen’s grid box with Horner of Chalerm Yoovidhya, who heads the Thai wing of Red Bull, of which he owns a 51% share, and who is understood to be backing Horner. His close personal attention to the team principal issued a strong message to those plotting against him: that for the moment at least the people with the deciding vote are standing by their man.

After a one-two, with Sergio Pérez ahead of Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc, with Mercedes’ George Russell in fifth and Lewis Hamilton in seventh, Red Bull’s rivals’ concerns will feel perhaps as weighty if at least focused entirely on ­matters of racing.

Verstappen punched the air and leapt into the arms of his mechanics and engineers when he climbed from the car. Their genuine exuberance was clearly undimmed by any of the drama of the week – for them the hard work over the winter was being rewarded but the sheer scale of it was daunting.

After qualifying Russell believed Verstappen might have as much as half a second a lap on the rest of the field. Verstappen accused him of ­exaggerating. Yet for great swathes of the race, once he had held his lead from pole through the first corner from Leclerc, it was between eight-tenths and a second a lap, an extraordinary chasm.

For the final third, with the job done and when he was clearly cruising, asking his engineer Gianpiero Lambiase if he needed to push at all seemed almost flippant. He was immediately assuaged and doubtless eased off but still had a 22-second lead at the flag.

It was brilliant without doubt – not least in that the lead was over his teammate in an identical car – and his mastery was on another level, but it could not be escaped that it was a little dispiriting too. So complete was his dominance and so enormous the margin that the remaining 23 races of the season stretch long into the year and the competition looks an awfully long way away from even the merest contemplation of making a fist of a challenge.

Last year it took many races before the consideration of a Red Bull clean sweep was being aired and they missed it by only one race, denied by Sainz in Singapore. This time the concept was being bandied about before the flag had even fallen.

“Great start to the year, guys, a one-two finish as well, so fantastic,” said Verstappen with the ease of a man who knows more are coming.

Amid the maelstrom around Horner, Verstappen did what he does best and performed on track at the Sakhir circuit with such control and composure it can only have delivered a reassuring sense of order across the team. The 26-year-old had said he hoped they would address their one weakness, through the slower speed corners, after an utterly dominant season in 2023.

They were duly bold with their new car, opting for a radical evolution that on early showing has at least maintained all of the strengths of last year’s model. If it has improved their pace on the street circuits such as Monaco and Singapore, it will potentially be untouchable.

The race pace Red Bull’s opposition had feared, and indeed predicted, the car would have turned out to be all too real. As with last season the car is not at its absolute peak over a single lap but in race trim it is clearly in a different class to the field, in Verstappen’s hands at least.

Moreover they demonstrated it on a track not historically suited to the Red Bull, where they have won only once in the last decade and that was last year, when they duly gave notice they had a formidable ride. This performance issued a forebodingly similar warning.

The Sakhir circuit is something of an outlier in performance terms, run at night, with an abrasive surface and an atypical layout, but Red Bull demonstrated that they do hold a definite pace advantage, most notably over Ferrari who must be considered their main rivals at this stage, while Mercedes are close but still lagging behind the Scuderia.

Verstappen is attempting to take a fourth consecutive title this season and began his attempt to do so with an opening drive that confirmed everything that had been expected of the new Red Bull and his form. Every indication is that he is up and gone already.