Max Verstappen held off the McLaren duo of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri to win the Japanese Grand Prix in brilliant style on Sunday.

McLaren remains the team to beat in Formula 1, but Max Verstappen’s victorious drive for Red Bull at the Japanese Grand Prix showed only excellence is good enough. Ahead of this week’s Bahrain Grand Prix, here are five takeaways from Suzuka:

“Perfection, just perfection, Max,” was the succinct summary of Verstappen’s race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase, a cool character not usually prone to such hyperbole. It spoke volumes of the result that Verstappen had delivered on Sunday.