A newly resurgent Verstappen, currently in fourth place, could be a threat for second place in the standings by season’s end. Not that he really cares. “I hope that we can carry that momentum forward. We don’t really have anything to win in the championship, right? I think Kimi is miles ahead. For me personally, I don’t care if I’m second, third, or fourth. Like, yeah, it doesn’t do anything. But I just want to have fun till the end, you know, try to go for a day’s success,” he said.
Once again, the Red Bull driven by Max Verstappen might be faster than any other car/driver combination on the grid.
Credit:
Mark Sutton – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images
With both sprint and race poles, and sprint and race victories, it was almost a perfect weekend for Verstappen, who only missed out on fastest lap to Leclerc, who came home second. It should have been a double podium for Ferrari. Hamilton did not have as much speed as Leclerc and started the race on an alternate strategy, using the medium tires instead of the softs.
These didn’t last long though, and Hamilton stopped on lap 17, switching to the softs. With most of the 62-lap race left to run, that set up the potential for a very long afternoon. And when Lance Stroll’s Aston Martin broke down as usual and caused a virtual safety car period, inexplicably Hamilton overrode the team’s instructions to follow Leclerc into the pits to solve the problem by making a cheap stop. Staying out on increasingly ruined tires left the seven-time champion a sitting duck to cars behind, and he turned third into sixth, apologizing to his team on the radio afterward.
More teammate fights
As we have discussed more than once this season, perhaps the cardinal rule as an F1 driver is “don’t hit your teammate.” That we’ve seen teammates battling a lot isn’t entirely unsurprising—if the cars are stratified by pace, and a team has two drivers of about the same caliber, then if they both perform well, they should qualify in similar positions and therefore find themselves racing together. Haas’ Oliver Bearman showed the right way to do that, going side by side with his teammate Esteban Ocon for several corners on lap 3, a battle that was sadly relegated to a small Picture in Picture window on the broadcast. (A couple of laps later, Bearman followed it with a late move on Carlos Sainz’ Williams, too.)