Red Bull’s 2023 Hungarian Grand Prix win was not only another Max Verstappen victory. It was the day the team moved beyond McLaren’s 1988 benchmark and made a modern Formula 1 season look almost indecently one-sided.
The record had stood for 35 years. McLaren won 11 consecutive races in 1988 with Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, a run that became shorthand for total team domination in the turbo era. On 23 July 2023, Red Bull reached 12 in a row by winning at the Hungaroring, stretching a sequence that had begun with the final race of 2022 and then rolled through the opening phase of 2023.
A record taken without drama
Verstappen started second behind Lewis Hamilton, who had taken Mercedes’ first pole position since 2021. That threatened, briefly, to give the race a different shape. It lasted until the first corner. Verstappen launched better, took the lead immediately and turned the afternoon into a controlled Red Bull exercise.
He won by more than half a minute from Lando Norris, with Sergio Pérez third in the second Red Bull after climbing from ninth on the grid. The result gave Red Bull the constructors’ record for consecutive victories and underlined the depth of its advantage. Even when Pérez had a difficult Saturday, the car had enough race pace to put him on the podium. When Verstappen had clear air, the race became a measurement problem for everyone else.
The achievement was not an exact repeat of McLaren’s 1988 pattern. Red Bull’s run crossed two seasons and came in a very different technical and sporting environment. That did not make it less impressive. Formula 1’s calendar had become longer, reliability expectations had changed and the field was far more operationally refined. Winning 12 straight races still required avoiding the ordinary ways dominant teams lose: poor starts, safety cars, strategy traps, tyre surprises and mechanical failures.
Dominance with Verstappen at the centre
Hungary was Verstappen’s seventh consecutive win and Red Bull’s eleventh victory from the first eleven races of 2023. The team’s RB19 had already established itself as the season’s defining car, especially in race trim, where tyre management and straight-line efficiency made it brutally difficult to attack.
The record did not end the run. Red Bull would keep winning, and Verstappen would turn the season into one of the most dominant individual campaigns in Formula 1 history. But Hungary was the day the comparison with McLaren stopped being theoretical. The old number had been passed, and it had been passed with the calm of a team that looked as if it had mislaid the concept of jeopardy.
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