Valtteri Bottas was running a deliberately more conservative one-stopping race in third and was already almost 7s adrift and he in turn was far clear from the second group, which was led almost throughout by Pierre Gasly’s AlphaTauri. So Verstappen had the gap over Hamilton out to 3s by the eighth lap and they’d left the rest of the field far behind. Better to control things from the front when there was no reason not to.
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The interrupted practices on a new circuit meant no-one was certain about the tyre behaviour, but running at the front two-stop looked faster in the simulations and from Red Bull’s perspective there was no point in not committing to it because even if they’d tried to one-stop Verstappen, Mercedes would have challenged them with a Hamilton two-stop, thereby forcing them to respond. Then Verstappen needed just to open out the undercut gap – accomplished by the end of the second lap – and settle into a comfortable two-stop sort of pace. Hamilton would be nowhere near close enough by the end of the straight to try a move. He burst through the orange smoke onto the pit straight from that crazy 18-deg banking already over 1.5s clear. It was an amazing spectacle, especially with the crowd roaring its approval. Verstappen took off like a scalded cat, didn’t even need to defend into Tarzan, immediately pulled out another great chunk as they went through the Merc’s bogey T2-3 sequence – and that gap just grew at every corner. It was a Silverstone-like situation but this time there was absolutely no ambiguity. The Red Bull was faster over a lap, no question, but that would mean little if Hamilton could slipstream past it just before its best bits, where passing would be impossible. The other way he may have lost the race would have been if he’d not got himself far enough out of Hamilton’s reach at the end of the opening lap – because the Red Bull was significantly slower than the Mercedes at the end of the pit straight, even without the Merc’s benefit of a tow. In combination, he lost around 0.3s from his ideal lap – but even that was enough to secure pole, by the margin of a few hundredths. The DRS mechanism then failed to function at the end of the lap which later analysis suggested cost 0.183s.
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So Verstappen never looked like not taking pole – until the final moments of Q3 when all of a sudden it became a little marginal! He’d got a bit of wheelspin over the kerbs on the exit of 3 and had double upshifted in response, this pulling a greater demand from the battery, leading to a small derate later. The dynamics of entering a banked corner mid direction change are complex and something about the Mercedes just didn’t resolve those demands very well. Certainly, it was bottoming out its front wing through there. One theory is that the wheelbase is just too long. The team couldn’t nail down why: it was a corner they had prepared extensively for in simulation, just like everyone else. The Alpines for example were taking almost as much time from the Mercs there as the Red Bull. It wasn’t just the Red Bull the Merc was struggling against there, it was several other ostensibly slower cars too. There was just no getting around that hard fact.
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It never got any closer than 0.18s through just that short sequence, and began the weekend even further off than that.
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The overwhelming part of that advantage came from the exit of Turn 2 to the banked entry of Turn 3, which is effectively all one sequence.įor whatever reason, the Mercedes just refused to work through there. There were a couple of moments where Verstappen’s victory might have got away from him – probably the biggest wobble being his less than perfect lap which only just secured him pole in a car in which he otherwise had around three tenths advantage.