QUALIFYING
“Yellows ahead, Max. Yellows, yellows, yellows!” Race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase left Max Verstappen in little doubt about the status of the final sector. The reigning champion obliged, lifted off and gently pulled for a downshift in respect of Valtteri Bottas parking up with a broken exhaust. That deliberate hesitation meant he kept his lap to snare pole for the first sprint contest of 2022.
In truth, the Red Bull racer was far from perfect in Q3. He’d corrected a slide at Tamburello and locked up at Rivazza to concede a tenth to Charles Leclerc on his first hot lap on intermediates. But when it counted, Verstappen was respectful of the slippery surface and remarkably patient on the throttle to avoid any oversteering theatrics.
He ultimately topped the times by 0.779 seconds over Leclerc, who’d backed off for a cool-down lap in anticipation of one final flier, which never came thanks to the flurry of interruptions.
Verstappen also hit the gravel after locking up at Tamburello. Fortunately for him, the Bottas stoppage morphed into a red flag to prevent any improvements, before Lando Norris also went off to leave the session abandoned with 40s to go.
A treacherous track exaggerated the intra-team pecking orders. Verstappen was left to fight Leclerc alone after Sergio Perez skated off at Acque Minerali to bleed 1.8s and land only seventh. Carlos Sainz clumsily rotated his car into the wall at Rivazza on an ill-fated second push lap in Q2 to start the sprint in 10th.
Even though Norris punched in two consecutive flying runs to leave himself without full battery assistance on either, he excelled again in low-grip conditions to seal third before his off and romp clear of Mclaren team-mate Daniel Ricciardo’s sixth.
Despite causing one of the red flags in Q3, Kevin Magnussen just kept the Haas out of the wall and avoided stalling in the gravel to return to the track and nail fourth. While Esteban Ocon was hobbled by a poorly gearbox, Fernando Alonso pounded his Alpine to fifth in a murky session when the leading lights shone.
But the mood was grey across the board at Mercedes, where a lack of downforce and persistently cold tyres tied George Russell to 11th, while Lewis Hamilton only squeezed into Q2 by 0.004s to eventually qualify 13th.
“VERSTAPPEN WAS REMARKABLY PATIENT ON THE THROTTLE TO AVOID ANY OVERSTEERING THEATRICS”
reason enough to give him the status of de facto number one Ferrari driver this term. That wasn’t quashed by Sainz’s latest shunt, as he bids to find a run of form and defy the support role for which he has already been cast. Sainz was perhaps less perturbed than many expected.“oh, well it is very simple,”he said.“in Australia, I was completely at fault. And here after reviewing the footage, I think I couldn’t have done anything more to give Daniel more space. So, two completely different incidents with very similar outcomes.
“The tough thing is that they come in a consecutive manner because over the season, there’s always going to be one race where
“THERE’S ALWAYS ONE RACE WHERE YOU DO A MISTAKE. AND ALWAYS ONE WHERE YOU GET BUMPED OUT”
you do a mistake. And there’s always going to be one race where you get bumped out. And for me, unfortunately, it has happened consecutively. It’s why it hurts more and it’s tougher. But hopefully we get them done nice and early in the season and now we can start focusing on the rest of the year.”
While Sainz sought to put an optimistic spin on his hasty retirement, it inescapably weakened the Ferrari challenge as
Leclerc was left to do battle on his own.
The sole use of the safety car came at the end of the opening tour to mop up the Sainz mess, it peeled back into the pits three laps later, and the RB18S dashed away unchallenged. It took until lap eight for Leclerc to relieve Norris of third, passing with the aid of the slipstream on the run to Tamburello. But the Monegasque was now 2.8s adrift of Perez, who in turn had slipped 3.3s behind Verstappen.
As the field increasingly began to weave off a drying racing line in search of patches of water to cool the fading intermediate tyres, Leclerc could slightly exceed Perez’s race pace to close to within
1.3s. Verstappen, meanwhile, was quicker than the pair of them and his advantage climbed towards a full 7s.
Following the collision with Sainz, and having pitted for a fresh set of inters, Ricciardo’s race was already in tatters. That allowed Mclaren to switch to a glorified test programme, including pitting the Australian for slicks on lap 16. Equipped with medium tyres, Ricciardo soon turned in a series of personal best sectors to indicate that the crossover had arrived.
Perez was the first of the leaders to blink, stopping for the yellow-walled C3s on lap 18 before Leclerc – the Prancing Horse mechanics had dashed out into the pitlane the previous lap – followed Verstappen in for slick tyres next time around. Here Ferrari made another error. Both rears were slow getting serviced to bleed away another 1.4s as Red Bull aced its champion’s change.
The new-for-2022 blanket temperatures, down from 100 to 70C, ensured that Perez was slow on his out-lap and Leclerc initially had the jump for second. But then he felt the shackles of the cooler rubber and was a sitting duck for the recovering Red Bull into Villeneuve as the 2-3 running order was restored. And when Perez locked his front-left into Variante Alta and skipped over the chicane to hit the grass, Leclerc couldn’t capitalise.
Verstappen swiftly re-established his 7s cushion after stopping. If anything, as per his FP2 simulations and late form in the sprint, he was even happier on slick tyres. The gap eventually exceeded 13s to Perez, with Leclerc another 3s in arrears. It was becoming more and more apparent with 15 laps to run that Ferrari didn’t have an answer for the speed of the lead Red Bull or the track position of Perez. It had to roll the dice.
On lap 49, Leclerc pitted for a set of the quickest tyres that were on offer in Italy, the C4 softs. Ferrari was seemingly only on course for third in a straight fight so, when the fronts started to grain and Leclerc approached lapped cars, the team had to ask the question of Red Bull. At the very least, Leclerc might nab a point for fastest lap.
“We were not running out of front tyres,”binotto confirmed.
“But we believed that there was no opportunity for us to attack and overtake Perez with those tyres anymore. We saw there could have been an opportunity and a possibility, and we went for it.”
Perez pitted the next lap to cover off the immediate threat from Leclerc, while Verstappen came in a lap later. The champion had requested to be put on the same strategy as his Ferrari rival, but Red Bull was already one step ahead and swapped him onto softs, despite the mediums already fitted having enough life to make the chequered flag.
Back behind Perez, Leclerc had spent much of the race observing where the RB18 was weakest. That was through Variante Alta, site of Perez’s excursion. Given that it fed into the DRS detection zone, if Leclerc could carry more speed through the right-left, he stood a chance of closing and deploying the overtaking aid in tandem with a strong tow. Fastest lap helped shrink the gap to just five tenths.
But the Bahrain and Australia winner was too greedy. On lap 53, Leclerc clattered over the inside kerb through the first part of the chicane. The car was unsettled, and he spun. The F1-75 squarely glanced the tyre wall to prevent terminal suspension damage, but the front wing was broken, and all hope of a podium vanished. Leclerc recovered the car to the pits to emerge in ninth after the most critical of all the Ferrari mistakes at Imola.
“I felt like it was probably one of the corners where Checo was a bit less competitive than me,”said Leclerc.“obviously on that lap, I knew that there was an opportunity. I tried to push a bit more, and it was too much. It was the mistake that cost me a lot and I’ll learn from it.”
Kevin Magnussen, Sebastian Vettel and Yuki Tsunoda fell victim to Leclerc late on, but sixth was the best the Ferrari could manage. Verstappen, meanwhile, could cruise across the line with 16.5s in hand over Perez to tie with Leclerc on two GP wins apiece so far this term. His late fastest-lap dash plus victory in the sprint combined for a maximum possible haul of 34 points in his efforts to make amends for the car unreliability at Sakhir and Albert Park.
“The start of the season in general wasn’t amazing so we needed a good weekend,”said Verstappen.“i didn’t expect it to be like this. The way we handled the race, we didn’t make any mistakes, the team made the right calls with switching from the intermediates to the slicks and from then on just controlled the race. It might look easy on the TV, but we still have to be focused, avoid the backmarkers as it is easy to go off-line or to lock up or go over a wet patch and go over the track. We managed that and the car was handling really well.”
With Perez third in the sprint and second on Sunday, Red Bull was only one point shy of the maximum possible team score too. Reflecting on the squad’s first 1-2 since the 2016 Malaysian GP, boss Christian Horner added:“this has to be one of our best-ever results. [It was a] phenomenal team performance because we took a bit of a risk coming into the weekend with a couple of small parts we introduced on the car, which is always tricky when you’ve only got one [practice session during a sprint weekend]. But we attacked the weekend from the word go, and both drivers have been unbelievable.”
Verstappen and Perez were not far shy of perfect on the day. So much so, Ferrari had to ask a question of them late on in the GP, the red cars having stumbled multiple times throughout the weekend. But
Red Bull quite comfortably had an answer to take what looked only to be a small gap in performance between the two and make it seem like something of a chasm.
“THIS HAS TO BE ONE OF OUR BEST-EVER RESULTS. WE ATTACKED THE WEEKEND FROM THE WORD GO”