“F*ck me this is boring, should’ve brought my pillow.” Those were the words of Red Bull’s Max Verstappen as he toured around Monaco’s streets in sixth place.
Verstappen started sixth and finished sixth in Monaco on Sunday. The same could be said for the top-10 as for the first time in Formula 1 history, all of the top-10 finished in the same order as they started. This begs the question, has the Monaco Grand Prix become boring?
Despite Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc breaking his Monaco curse to take an emotional maiden home victory and Sergio Perez, Haas and Alpine generating some carbon fibre-crushing chaos on the opening lap, the Monaco GP was a dull affair yet again. Monaco’s tight, twisting streets and F1’s behemoth cars combined for a less than enthralling spectacle where overtaking was at an extreme premium.
The 70-plus lap procession wiped all memory of Saturday’s heart-pounding qualifying session and Verstappen was searching for a solution post-race. Verstappen stated he would welcome possible track changes at Monaco amid a GP which he branded as “not racing”. The Dutchman said, “First I would like to try to, if there are possibilities, change a few things. Because it’ll make the excitement even better. Overall the weekend is really cool, just the Sunday is a little bit boring unfortunately, but the scenery is still great. If we can find a way to race a bit better, why not? That would be my preferred solution.”
Regarding potential alterations to the unique circuit configuration, Verstappen added: “Yes, because you cannot pass at the moment. If they ask for my opinion, I will try to see what is possible, but it also depends what roads you are going to take.”
Monaco’s circuit layout has remained relatively unchanged in its 70-year stint on the F1 calendar. However, in that time, F1 cars have changed dramatically and perhaps it is time to consider some tweaks.
This was certainly the viewpoint of Verstappen’s Team Principal Christian Horner on Friday ahead of the Grand Prix.
“I think with the size of these cars and the weight of these cars, they’re so big now, arguably they’re too big to be racing around these streets because you can barely get two side-by-side,” Horner said. “So that inevitably is going to cause issues. Now we race here because of the history, the heritage, and it’s a phenomenal venue and there’s a great deal of prestige in winning this race.
“But by and large, this race will be won tomorrow afternoon in qualifying. We should always be open to where can we improve. Now, we either need to make the cars considerably smaller going forward for ’26, which isn’t really on the cards, or to have a really entertaining in a race here then we ought to look at least the possibility of could we open up some areas that could potentially create at least an overtaking opportunity and what would it what would it envelop to achieve that? So I think that’s something that Formula 1, I know, is acutely aware of, and I’m sure Monaco as well. But to protect the next 70 years here, I think that there needs to obviously be some evolution. You need to have areas that you can potentially have some jeopardy, potentially can overtake, and really, here, in these cars now, you’ve got to be very lucky to pull off an overtake.”
Evolution hasn’t necessarily been Monaco’s strong suit as a F1 race promoter. It’s widely known that Monaco pays considerably less than other GP venues for the privilege of hosting F1, regarding itself as irreplaceable on the calendar. Furthermore, it wasn’t until last year, that Monaco handed over TV direction duties to F1 itself – another sign that it is slow to keeping pace with modern GP hosting.
With the likes of Monza and Barcelona spending considerable sums to update infrastructure in accordance with modern F1 standards, albeit too late perhaps in the latter’s case, the time has come for Monaco to rethink its ways. It needn’t be a stretch for Monaco to tweak its layout slightly and if it means the sport’s most prestigious race cements itself on the calendar for another seven decades, a little compromise wouldn’t hurt.
Discussion about this post