TEAMS: 1: Red Bull Racing. Built a dominant car, so easy #1. It's flat out maximum speed really was not that much better than the next best on most weekends. The fastest driver often had to put in a stunner to nab pole position.The second half of the season the Red Bull only claimed 5 poles. Race pace, different story. The car was fast on pretty much every track, rain or shine. Pitstops were fantastic, strategy was on point, and reliability was exceptional. Of course it's helpful when you're leading the race by 20 seconds. 2: Mercedes. The best of the rest was really an exciting, hard fought battle between several teams. Despite complaints of the W14 having a very narrow operating window, the car was on average the 2nd best car over the entire season. It was often 3rd best in the first handful of races when AMR was good, and it was 3rd best when McLaren was good. There were times it was the 2nd best car, and sometimes it was 4th. Aside from a couple races here and there, there was never a period of time when the car was complete garbage. The team did a great job with development to maintain their position, not easy to do in the budget cap era. 3: McLaren. The team missed the mark massively to start the season. One of the worst cars to start the season, very slow, very inconsistent. Only 6 points finishes in the first 9 races. They upgraded and worked on the car to the maximum and turned the car into the 2nd best car for much of the last part of the season. That is an incredible, mind blowing achievement. They also claimed the fastest pitstop ever. 9 podiums in the final 13 races. When you talk about development and improvements, nobody did a better job than McLaren. 4: Ferrari. The car was fast. 3rd or 4th best through the first 1/3rd of the season. Quick in qualifying, but chewed up tires. Ferrari brought a huge upgrade that turned out to be a bit of a failure. They didn't give up and figured out how to extract the speed from the new package with additional upgrades through the season. The second half of the season, the car was properly fast. It was the only car to really challenge Red Bull in quali all year, and during the second half it was the outright fastest car at a lot of tracks. 6 poles to Red Bull's 5. Very impressive. However they struggled to translate that speed into results. Some of that due to characteristics with the car. It was still not great on tires, but worse off Ferrari seemed to have to turn the engine down for the races. Often doing lift and coast to reduce overheating, and who knows what other reasons. Regardless, even with the fastest car in quali, the Ferrari was not the same in the races when it mattered. Of course the drivers made their share of mistakes and the team as well. Strategy continues to be a disaster for Ferrari. Ferrari had a car good enough for 2nd in the WCC, but they threw away a lot of points to not deserve it. 5: Aston Martin. Out of the gates in 2023 you have to give AMR maximum grades for somehow coming up with a rocket of a car, several seconds faster than their 2022 challenger. That was more impressive than what Red Bull was able to do over the winter, by a long shot. Similar to Red Bull's case, a lot of their stunning results can be credited to their star driver, Fernando Alonso. But the team get's an A+ for the car they created. Unfortunately, in typical Stroll managed fashion, the car went to complete trash. The worst development program in F1 to the point they were pulling "upgrades" off the car because they actually made it worse. They had enormous amounts of CFD and Wind Tunnel time. This is the golden ticket when having the 2nd best car. A recipe to not only easily maintain their 2nd best position, but even close the gap to Red Bull and perhaps get some victories. Instead the team disastrously fell as far back as the 6th best team on some weekends. To add to their misery, they also made plenty of mistakes with strategy and sub par pitstops. This might go down as one of the biggest blown opportunities in recent history. 6: Williams. I have to give them credit for what they have achieved in the last 12 months. James Vowles is likely a huge part of that improvement. For years they have managed to design the worst chassis on the grid and were only holding on because they had the best engine. As usual, they only have one driver that's worth a damn. Over the past 5 years or so, Williams usually gets worse during the year. This season they actually got better. We didn't see any spectacular upgrades, but they did they get better and were able to not only get the car into Q3 from time to time, but were often in the hunt for a point or two. When you factor in their very outdated facilities and still limited budget, the team is pushing forward in the right direction. 7: Alpine. It has to be a huge disadvantage being the only car running a Renault PU. It's fair to say they had the least power on the grid which hurt their performance every single race. They don't really have a B team like Red Bull, Ferrari, or Mercedes has. So there is a lot going against them. But they have a team proven to be worthy of best of the rest. They have 2 good drivers. This team can get results. 2023 however was a struggle. The had enough of a headstart to be ahead of the really bad teams, but they were never close to fighting with the top 4. Close to the end of the season they managed to climb up around 5th best, which is a positive. Fortunately they had two qualified drivers that were capable of scoring points any time it was possible. They have to be disappointed by how far teams like Aston Martin pulled away from them. 8: AlphaTauri. They looked miserable for 80% of the season. Yuki Tsunoda has improved immensely, but honestly speaking he is still far from being a top class driver. Their driver line up was a weak point all season. Liam Lawson shows up on short notice and came out to be their top performing driver. The car wasn't good enough to be in the points until near the very end of the season when they brought some very good upgrades. 4 point finishes in the final 5 races. If they could have brought the upgrades a few races sooner, or if they had 2 performing drivers each weekend, they likely would have overtaken Williams for 7th in the WCC. 9: Alfa Romeo. There is not much good to say about their season. Sadly they never made any progress on the chassis and were never really fighting for points. Another victim of the Ferrari PU that was a poor performer in the race. In today's F1, their drivers fall below average which also doesn't help. 10: Haas. It's hard to imagine how that car could be so bad in the race. The Haas VF-23 was pretty darn quick in qualifying, we saw it reach Q3 several times. So the speed was in the car, and we always hear teams say they would take a car with speed first and foremost, because it's easier to make a fast car reliable, driveable, or raceable. Yet despite a long 22 race season, loads of CFD and Wind Tunnel time, they never managed to make that car remotely respectable in the race. It is likely another example of how good the Ferrari PU was turned up to the max, but how bad it was being forced to be turned down in the races. Regardless, when starting in the top 10, they shouldn't be dropping like a bolder to the bottom 5 positions.
