Max Verstappen won the Canadian Grand Prix on 18 June 2023, leading a Red Bull race that looked simple because the team and driver made it simple. The result gave Red Bull its 100th Formula 1 victory and brought Verstappen level with Ayrton Senna on 41 grand prix wins.
A milestone wrapped in another controlled Sunday
Verstappen started from pole in Montreal and controlled the race from the front. Fernando Alonso finished second for Aston Martin, with Lewis Hamilton third for Mercedes, but neither could turn the afternoon into a sustained fight for the win. The race instead became another entry in Red Bull’s dominant 2023 run.
The numbers were the point. Red Bull had entered Formula 1 in 2005 after taking over Jaguar, and its path to 100 wins had included Sebastian Vettel’s title years, the hybrid-era rebuild and Verstappen’s own rise into the team’s central figure. The century arrived less than two decades after the team’s debut, which is not bad for a project that still carried fizzy-drink jokes when it began.
Senna’s number and Red Bull’s scale
Verstappen matching Senna’s 41 wins did not make their careers identical, but it placed his statistics into a historical register that was becoming harder to ignore. By mid-2023 he was no longer only defending a championship. He was stacking records at a pace that made older reference points disappear quickly.
For Red Bull, the 100th win confirmed the team as one of modern F1’s major constructors rather than a successful disruption story. The 2023 Canadian Grand Prix therefore works as both a driver milestone and a team milestone. It was not the wildest race on 18 June, but it was one of the clearest measures of how far Red Bull had moved the sport around itself.
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