Does Formula 1 have a championship fight on its hands?

The Saudi Arabian Grand Prix was yet another dominant performance from Red Bull Racing, but it was the team’s other driver, the less-talked-about Sergio Perez, who led the comfortable one-two finish.

Yes, he had some assistance from teammate Max Verstappen’s broken drive shaft in qualifying, but there was no doubting the quality of his drive to fend off the fast-recovering Dutchman at the end of the race.

Perez dominated the grand prix on his own terms.

Now he just has to keep up the pace for another, say, 21 rounds and we might get a thrilling title conclusion.

Fernando Alonso was almost as happy as Perez despite being demoted from third to fourth. Aston Martin’s progress is being validated as legitimate — and maybe even as underrated — with every lap, and Jeddah was another big statement for the former F1 minnow.

McLaren’s continued its descent with another disappointing evening, though at least both cars made it to the flag this week, while Ferrari ended the day arguably most underwhelming team of all, finishing a mystifyingly uncompetitive fourth-best car ahead of what looks like a longer and longer season for the Italians.

Perez stakes claim with dominant victory

If Red Bull Racing is going to dominate the season — and let’s not pretend things aren’t heading in that direction — then Perez needs to take the fight to Verstappen if we’re to have any hope of a title battle.

Fortunately the Mexican looks like he’s doing exactly that — at least at the moment.

After getting back past Alonso at the start and perfectly managing the safety car restart, he had only a duel with his teammate to deal with to make it to the flag.

The Dutchman recovered from 15th to second with half the race still to run and with a 5.8-second deficit to the lead. He took the flag 5.3 seconds adrift, a negligible improvement after 25 laps of racing.

The reigning champ was clearly pushing hard in the closing stage of the race — much to the displeasure of his team, mind you, which was effectively asking him to hold second by giving him a target lap time to stay above.

Eventually Verstappen’s insistence on getting under that lap time came to Perez’s attention, and he was given permission to push harder to maintain his advantage.

He wasn’t quiet about it — he asked rhetorically whether there was any point risking mechanical problems when a one-two was assured — but he comfortably picked up the pace and kept Verstappen around five seconds behind him.

The Dutchman had to concede defeat, and instead he focused on picking up the bonus point for fastest lap to maintain the championship lead.

Yes, Perez was assisted by Verstappen’s grid penalty, but the final stint after the safety car was a straight fight, and he won it convincingly.

It’s not a total surprise to see him in good form. In Bahrain his pace was comparable to Verstappen’s once he got into second place, and he’s been more positive about his comfort in this car than he was last year.

He’s also developed a reputation as a street-circuit specialist, with all but one of his five wins coming on public roads — not a bad reputation considering how many street tracks comprise the calendar.

The only question now is whether he can continue the fight.

Alonso loses 100th podium but statement was already made

Fernando Alonso will have the dubious honour of celebrating his 100th Formula 1 podium twice, having been stripped of third place after the rostrum celebrations for a penalty infringement.

Alonso was slapped with a five-second penalty for starting the race outside his grid box. He served it at his first pit stop, but his rear jack operator engaged the jack as soon as the car came into the pits rather than waiting until the time penalty had been completed, which is against the rules.

The FIA took a dim view of it, and after the flag Alonso had 10 seconds added to his race time, dropping him to fourth behind George Russell.

But it was interesting to consider how both Alonso and Russell reflected on the swapped positions.

“I think the penalty for Fernando is harsh,” Russell told Sky Sports. “They are deserving podium finishers today. But I’ll take an extra trophy!”

Alonso was less perturbed.

“It doesn’t hurt much to be honest,” he said. “I care, but I don’t care that much, because I celebrate.

“Arguably here we were faster than in Bahrain on race pace. We could control quite easily the Ferraris. We could control the Mercedes. I don’t want to be too optimistic, but it looks good for the future.”

Aston Martin’s story this season isn’t how many podiums Alonso will collect — and he seems likely to collect quite a few. It’s how fast the team can make this car during the season and for next year, and by that metric, Saudi Arabia was another enormous success, with the green team clearly the second-quickest car.

And with the pace he showed in Saudi Arabia, Alonso will more than make up for the three points lost to Mercedes in the coming races.

Question marks over penalty, safety, car decisions

But that penalty did rankle Alonso for another reason — the sheer amount of time it took for it to be handed down.

Alonso served his penalty at his pit stop at the end of lap 18, giving the stewards ample time to investigate whether it had been executed correctly.

Instead it took until the very closing stages of the race for an investigation to be opened, and the penalty was applied after the podium ceremony.

“I think it’s more an FIA poor show today more than a disappointment from ourselves,” Alonso told Sky Sports. “You cannot apply a penalty [32] laps after a pit stop. They have enough time to really inform about the penalty.

“If I knew that, maybe I open 11 seconds to the car behind.”

The ideal is always to have the result known at the flag, and it’s hard to understand how the stewards missed the chance to ensure this was the case.

The late investigation came after questions were raised about race control’s decision to deploy the safety car to recover Lance Stroll’s stopped Aston Martin early in the race.

Stroll suffered a suspected energy recovery system failure and was told to retire on track. He rolled his AMR23 into a gap the fence deep in some run-off to minimise disruption. The marshals barely had to wheel it behind the barrier.

Bafflingly, the full safety car was called regardless despite the incident requiring a virtual safety car at most.

“From the initial camera angles available the exact position of the stopped car was unclear, and therefore safety car was deployed as the safest option,” the FIA said in a statement.

Erring on the side of caution is always the better option, particularly at a circuit as fast and risky as Jeddah, but it was another case of processes in need of refinement. Better communication with the marshal post surely could have avoided the need to neutralise the race.

Another shocker for McLaren, but at least both finished

The optimism of Oscar Piastri’s excellent Q3 appearance was extremely short-lived, with the Australian’s race almost immediately undone by a broken front wing in a surprisingly light moment of contact with Pierre Gasly.

Worse still, the snapped-off endplate bounced into teammate Lando Norris, damaging his car too.

Both had to pit for new noses, putting them out of points contention. They finished 15th and 17th, Piastri ahead of Norris.

But even without the early stops it would have been difficult to see the papaya cars in the top 10 judging by their race pace. The back of the pack was fair reflection of the MCL60’s raw pace.

“I definitely think we were worse today,” Norris told Sky Sports, comparing the car’s pace to Bahrain. “Our strengths and weaknesses clearly just aren’t in the right places.

“I wouldn’t even say we’re good in the corners, but we’re way too slow in the straights and we can’t use what we have in the corners, in high speed.

“I can get close, but then we just can’t do anything more than that. Even the Williams, when I got DRS open I’m barely quicker than them.”

But there was some good news for Piastri at least, who managed to get a race distance under his belt — and in some fashion, doing the entire race bar the first lap on a single set of tyres, an enormously impressive achievement.

“I’m glad we finished the race first and foremost, because on lap 1 I didn’t think that was going to happen — again,” he said.

“It’s nice to get a bit of experience again, a bit of racecraft back in the end, learning to use the battery to overtake people and stuff like that — all in the bank. That’s what I’m out there for, to learn at the moment. We’ll try again in Melbourne.”

It was a comprehensive weekend for the Melburnian — and was there the slightest hint of defensiveness from Norris after he was asked to let Piastri by to finish two places up the road?

“I quite easily could have probably kept the position at the end and got past the Williams, but I just let [Piastri] go,” he said of the team order to let Piastri through to pass Logan Sargeant for 15th.

We’ll wait and see if and when these battles are for points.

More dissapointment for ferrari as mercedes makes a step

Ferrari needed to prove this weekend that it had the fundamental pace to be a challenger this season. It left Jeddah with the wind fully out of its sails.

Without doubt it was the fourth quickest car this weekend comfortably behind Mercedes, which in turn was comfortably behind Aston Martin, and they’re all way behind Red Bull Racing.

More concerning is that Ferrari didn’t expect to be so far off the pace and isn’t sure why it ended up there.

“After Friday practice even before coming into the weekend we thought we had [Mercedes] and we thought we were quick,” Carlos Sainz told Sky Sports. “Even after quali … we thought in race trim we were going to be okay. And today we were not okay.

“We need to see why. We need to improve. It’s already two different tracks where our race pace is not great. We know we have work to do.”

Charles Leclerc, having recovered from 12th to seventh but clearly despondent about the size of Ferrari’s backwards step, was even more straightforward.

“A lot [of work to do],” he said. “Really a lot.

“Straight lines they are quicker and corners they are quicker, so we need everything.”

Ferrari still has reasonable qualifying pace but evidently no way yet to convert that to race pace.

Considering Mercedes is in the process of tearing up the concept of the car that comfortably beat Ferrari this weekend, one has to wonder what Ferrari is thinking about its own development trajectory in a season fast becoming a title write-off