SPRINT RACE
Formula 1 should have been on a hiding to nothing by staging a sprint race at Imola. Ross Brawn wanted to run the alternative weekend set-up at the first European round “to remind everyone what it was about”. But at a venue where overtaking has proved notoriously difficult, it seemed unlikely that the supposedly snappy, high-octane format would produce anything other than a procession.
But the Saturday race last weekend might be considered the best of the four sprints to date. That’s thanks to the late crescendo that brought Max Verstappen back into contention to pass Charles Leclerc and bag the increased eight points for victory, plus pole position for the proper
Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.
Qualifying pacesetter Verstappen looked to have immediately spurned his chance to cut the standings deficit to Leclerc when he struggled for traction off the line. “I let off the clutch and immediately had a lot of wheelspin,” said the Red Bull driver. “Then I had no gear sync in the most important gears at the start, which is very strange.”
In the press conference,
Leclerc would be quick to rebut the suggestion that he and Verstappen were neck and neck into Tamburello. Rightly so – the Ferrari racer was well ahead and nipped into the lead.
The safety car was hastily brought into play courtesy of a first-lap coming together between Zhou Guanyu and Pierre Gasly at Tosa, for which neither driver copped the blame. But when it returned to the pits, Leclerc bolted away. Come the end of lap five of 21, he’d built a lead of 1.027 seconds to put himself out of DRS range. That margin crept up to its peak of 1.7s after 13 laps and it seemed inevitable that members of ‘Charles Leclerc: The Official Marche Fan Club’ sitting in the grandstand would watch their hero cross the finish line first.
But Leclerc had asked too much of his soft Pirellis too early and, thanks to the Friday deluge, the track surface hadn’t been sufficiently rubbered in, and so began to tear his front-right. Verstappen soon had the bit between his teeth, telling his race engineer to get off the radio and leave him be, as he pumped in a series of personal best sectors.
The Red Bull did suffer spikes of oversteer as Verstappen gave chase. He soon tucked into the powerful slipstream out of Rivazza and thumbed DRS to launch past into Tamburello. In the latest display of mutual respect between the pair, Leclerc gave the reigning champion just enough room. Verstappen perfectly kept the RB18 on the asphalt through the tight chicane to take the position and run to the spoils by 3s as Leclerc’s tyres continued to fade.
The dry conditions helped the natural competitive order be restored insofar as Sergio
Perez (third, from seventh) and Carlos Sainz (fourth, from 10th) made the major gains after their underwhelming qualifying performances. Both used DRS and made the braking zone of Tamburello their hunting ground to work past Daniel Ricciardo and a slow-starting Fernando Alonso before finally completing their respective ascents by outdragging Lando Norris over the timing line.
Fourth-starting, mediumshod Kevin Magnussen knew immediately when the tyre blankets came off his rivals’ cars to reveal the red writing of the softs that his Haas would be a moving target. He slipped to eighth behind Valtteri Bottas.