New York - Red Bull's Max Verstappen shrugged off a suggestion he was favourite for a third successive Formula One championship and said on Friday that the sport needed a closer battle than last year even if he intended to be better than ever.
Verstappen won 15 of 22 races in a 2022 season that was his team's best yet with Mexican team mate Sergio Perez adding two to the tally. Rivals and runners-up Ferrari won four races and once-dominant Mercedes, third overall, just one.
"As a driver you always try to look at yourself, what can you do better and you try to come back stronger every single year even though sometimes that's a hard task," he told reporters after the team's livery launch in New York.
Asked how keen he was for Mercedes to get back into the fight, with seven times world champion Lewis Hamilton failing to win a race in a season for the first time in his career, Verstappen replied:
"I think in the interests of the sport you always want the teams to be super-close. But I do think it was already quite close last year.
"I think as a team we also really executed a lot of things better than the other teams and that's why I guess the points gap was also so big. I never really felt, apart from two or three races, we absolutely dominated the whole weekend. But for the sport everybody wants to have a title battle with multiple teams involved."
Ferrari has changed team bosses since the end of last season with Mattia Binotto replaced by Fred Vasseur, while Mercedes have lost strategy director James Vowles to Williams as new principal.
"I never really think about being the favourite because you have to keep on working, you have to keep on improving because if you're not they will catch up and overtake you," said Verstappen.
"About people leaving other teams, I don't know. It's difficult to say from the outside if it's a good thing or a bad thing, is it going to interrupt their work?
"If new people come in it always takes a little bit of time to settle in ... but I think you can still get a lot of performance out of it straight away."
Red Bull took their season launch to the United States on Friday with a spray of pyrotechnics in front of a rapt, standing room-only Manhattan crowd as fans braved the bitter cold outside.
Where once NASCAR and IndyCar had a stranglehold on American gearheads, the splash hit Netflix docu-drama "Drive to Survive" has indoctrinated legions of new fans in the United States.
Neither icy cold nor eye-watering winds whipping along the Hudson River could deter the dozens of people who showed up outside the Classic Car Club on Friday, hoping to catch a glimpse of their favourite drivers heading for the launch.
"I’ve been following it for a while and around 2017, 2016 it wasn’t that big in the United States," said Tyler Quinn, 21, a college student in Manhattan, who last year saved up to see the Formula One race in Canada and feared the growing fan base could make future trips prohibitively expensive.
"It’s exploded exponentially. You know, when I talk to people in school ... they all know about F1, they all recognise certain things, they all ask me questions. It’s growing fast and I really am glad about that."
Las Vegas will join Austin and Miami as the third race in the United States in the 2023 calendar as F1 looks to make further inroads into the lucrative market.
Speaking at the members-only Classic Car Club, where a garage of luxury cars is available for patrons to enjoy, Red Bull Racing Team Principal Christian Horner told Reuters that "Drive to Survive" had been a "game changer".
"It seems to have sparked interest in the US - and not just the U.S. but globally," he said. "The U.S. interest has been off the charts in the last couple of years and that's why we're now seeing so many brands coming into the sport."
The event also served as the unveiling of a new partnership with the Ford Motor Company, which will partner Red Bull Powertrains, the company established to build engines for Red Bull, in a show of confidence for the sport's U.S. popularity.
Ford will return to Formula One with the reigning champions in 2026 after an absence of more than 20 years.
"We looked at a lot of options as good business people and we wanted to go in the direction that was authentic to us," Jim Farley, President and CEO of Ford said at the announcement.
Reuters