Why is a false start / start infringement in which you gain an advantage only a 5 second penalty. It should be a 20 second penalty.
Ferrari's have come alive, track temp? Looking forwards to seeing how this all unfolds, deg is bad, hards are ****. 3 stops?
Even with a Safety car, Ferrari are still 20 & 28 seconds behind McLaren well done George, stopped Norris finishing second. Congratulations Oscar, you are more likely to be the next world champion over cry baby Lando.
Id say the safety car widened the margin by forcing Ferrari on the hards early. If Leclerc runs long on the mediums then swaps to softs he definitely gets closer to Piastri. No chance of winning, but probably keeps it within 10 seconds.
Piastri very good all weekend. Ferrari with promising signs in all fairness - even on the rubbish hard tyre Le Clerc kept a pretty decent pace- had they have gone onto a used medium or soft he’d have a podium. A bit more fine tuning and the second half of their “fix” and I suspect Ferrari will have a good car.
The sleeper this season is George Russell. Whilst the McLaren boys squabble, Max dips in and out with his inconsistent Red Bull, and Ferrari solve their issues, he’s bagged 3 podiums from 4, their car looks stable, and if they actually developed in season he’d be looking pretty good. All depends on what the development pipelines are like.
Piastri did make the big blunder in Australia, but he is only at the start of his third season. Plus he's looked quicker than Norris on Sunday in all 4 races so far, a huge improvement from 2024. I'd be pretty satisfied overall with how he's developing as a driver. Lando meanwhile no longer seems to have the pace advantage he did last year and hasn't yet made the step up he needed to in consistency. Just today he's picked up a silly penalty, fluffed a restart and not showed great racecraft when fighting Hamilton, Leclerc or Russell. This weekend was an easy 2nd in that car. Early days of course, Lando can still still turn it around, but he needs to find something extra in himself quickly.
I don’t fully buy he’s been faster at each race, it’s pretty easy to push a bit and give that impression when you’re bottled up behind a driver you can’t actually pass. If we assume he has been faster in all 4 then he’s really wasted that advantage so far through mistakes in Japan and Australia, whereas you could say Norris has done well to minimise the damage from some poor qualifying sessions in China and Bahrain. I honestly don’t know what the outcome will be this year, ultimately I think they’re probably equally talented, Norris perhaps a little faster, Piastri a bit mentally stronger. It seems the car does things that are hindering Norris’ qualifying speed and that’s making things a little easier for Oscar at the moment. I’m sure it will swing back and forth, which is good for us as fans, we’d be in for a pretty dull year I think if one of them was dominant.
If they’d have gone to a used Medium they’d have been disqualified. It does seem like a very Ferrari thing to do though!
I think having expectations that he will match Charles is setting him up to fail. It’s reasonable that he’ll take time to adapt to a new environment and that as an older driver that adaption will take longer than we might normally expect - until it’s natural mistakes will be an occasional consequence. Also I do think the fact that Charles has never had a sustained period of success causes people to underrate him, but also that - it went under the radar a bit - he went up another level last year and is now ready to contend for a Championship. I’m sure he can learn from Hamilton, as all drivers might learn from another, but he was teammate to a 4xWDC early in his career, I really don’t see him as a driver that needs mentoring.
George escapes without a penalty, which concludes a very good weekend for Piastri, who has now eradicated his Australia mistake. RedBull really seems to be falling apart, aside from the car issues, the pitstops have been poor this year and this weekend they were disastrous. The one bright spot was that Tsunoda does seem to be a reasonable fit for the car and got a decent result from the 2nd RedBull for the first time in ages, although perhaps a bit lucky to not be penalised for his incident with Sainz. I was impressed with Antonelli again in the first part of the race, his race was somewhat ruined by the safety car intervention, but I detected another step from him this weekend. Nice to have a race with some action after a couple of snoozefests.
