F1 Team Bosses Select Their 2023 Driver Of The Year

The 2024 F1 season is fast approaching, but the ten team principals took a moment to look back and come up with their driver of the year for 2023… and their selection will raise few eyebrows.

Each boss was asked to rank their top 10 drivers of the campaign, with each given points for their position – 25 points were awarded to first-place picks, with a descending scale down to one point for those in tenth place.

And you won’t be shocked to learn who they opted for…

Maximum Verstappen

The betting odds for the 2024 season have been released by sportsbooks like Paddy Power, who make Max Verstappen a -450 favorite ahead of the likes of Lewis Hamilton (+850) and Sergio Perez (+2500).

A betting calculator reveals that a $10 wager on Verstappen would yield a potential profit of just $2.22 if the Dutchman can oblige – that confirms how well he is favored by the oddsmakers.

Verstappen will go into 2024 as the defending Drivers’ Championship title holder, of course, and he’s added an extra win to his collection – albeit one with rather less fanfare – having been voted as 2023’s best by F1 principals.

And for context, out of the maximum 250 points that were available in the voting, he notched a whopping 240 of them – 33 more than Verstappen landed in the same annual poll 12 months ago.

Aston Martin veteran Fernando Alonso secured second place, thanks to an impressive maiden season at the firm that saw the Spaniard land eight podium finishes.

Alonso was the highest climber in the standings, although team bosses were rather less impressed by the efforts of Hamilton, Perez and Charles Leclerc, who all slid down the leaderboard.

No Love Lost

As the team bosses were casting their votes, F1’s 20 drivers also had a chance to have their say on which of their peers they rated the highest last season.

Again, you won’t be flabbergasted to learn that Verstappen won the day, although Lewis Hamilton has been shown more respect by his fellow handlers than team principals – he climbed up one place in the ballot from 2023 to second place.

The votes are anonymous and kept a secret, although intriguingly it has been reported by sources that Hamilton himself had abstained from voting at all – the only driver to do so.

There is, of course, no love lost between the Brit and Verstappen, with the duo waging a veritable war in 2021 that spilt into collisions on the track and crossed words off it. That said, the rivalry between the pair seems to have mellowed somewhat given that they are no longer at loggerheads at the front of the grid since Red Bull exerted their dominance over the sport.

Elsewhere, the 19 drivers that did vote in the poll were also impressed with the performances of Alonso, who climbed to third place in the standings, with Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon also on the rise.

But how will the 2024 vote go?