Unfastened his safety belt to collect a Brazilian flag after winning. Probably just a fine; Mercedes will riot if they took his race win away for that
He got a 5k fine. Given he drove largely blind due to said flag for a few miles at 40mph or so he is deserving. Wolff also dared stick in the 5 place grid penalty for his engine change in his usual injustice rant. Very entertaining race but too many whingers around the sidelines for me
5k is pathetic really though, it's like us mere morals 5p! I'm a RB & Max fan but Mercedes are usually much more classy than RB with their comments, not today.
yes . We are seeing a different Toto ( Christian ) since the pressure has been on . Having said that , he is nowhere near as spiteful / graceless as Horner IMHO .
Imo is 0.3 seconds but it doesn't matter it's a cake walk unless Mercedes get the tyres wrong. The teams.might underestimate the tyres here. Imo this is a clear 2 stop race as it's a green track with no support races so even though pirelli took the most conservative tyre choice here I think one tyre is going to go under the load on that big long left.
For me red bull are likely to go 2 stop agressive here if they can get the gap to slot in and go hard. Horner has put it out there already compared to wolff who is desperate to say deg is low. The fact is verstappen must stay second so bottas is less of a factor and push Hamilton along.
Excellent result against the Boks yesterday.They threw it away with some poor kicking and decision making.Just glad Faff wasn't playing coz he's a little **** but probably best scrum half in the world at the moment.
There are, as Fernando Alonso said after qualifying, “a lot of question marks” going into this race, the first on a track designed for motorbike racing. Is it a one-stop or a two? It seems finely poised between. Is overtaking possible or not? It is expected to be very difficult, because it’s so hard to follow. These two facts, teams believe, could lead to a race of tyre management, with people cruising around looking after tyres trying to lock in a one-stop - and those behind wondering whether to stay where they are in the train, or jump for a stop. This could lead to as extreme a tyre-management race as is typically seen in Monaco or Singapore. The difficulty facing teams in trains is firstly which tyre to fit at a stop. The hard will last longest, but it has a pace deficit and has almost no under-cut power - to the extent that you risk being over-cut. So if someone pits out of a train, for example, the cars still out on track could speed up, and you’ve wasted your stop. The chances of a safety car - virtual or real - are expected to be high, because the kerbs are damaging cars and that could lead to carbon-fibre debris that needs clearing up. And the pit-lane time loss is also high - at 26 seconds or so, about 10 less under caution. All this is likely to lead to a race of caution, of cat and mouse.
Lots of punctures (those kerbs are ridiculous, they kill the wings too) but only one virtual safety car. Yet another track where overtakes were purely about DRS. Both the drivers and constructors championships get tighter, over to Saudi Arabia we go...
The reality is a lot of teams went in arrogantly believing they could ignore pirelli and decide the tyres would last. The left front is under massive load every lap sound that massive left hander. Every tyre that burst was burst on the inner part of the front left tyre so what do they expect when they run the tyre to death? Bottas went 33/34 laps on mediums when told it was 30max. He had no need to run that long. The teams that 2 stopped (and hamilton was lucky that merc just decided to match verstappen due to 10 second lead at the time) if he got his wish to run long and I quote "my tyres feel good dont stop me early" then he could be the one with a dnf. That's the margins here. Mercedes absolutely ****ed up today and got away with it due to verstappen pressure. If verstappen was 4th or 5th 30 seconds down the road then hamilton might have run long and ran into that issue. The red bull absolutely butt ****ed perez twice. Bother had no gap to go into and they dropped him right in it and cost him an easy podium.
Hmm not sure. It was a well over 9 second gap with only a few laps left and he wasn't then catching nearly fast enough. Alonso managed the softs better than bottas managed hards ffs. But red bull screwed perez with pit stops twice
I dunno, I didnt think there was time, hed need to have done it in 2 laps not 3 as turn 1 is the only passing opportunity. 2 seconds a lap? Plus alonso would have hammered it last lap as well.
yes thats ture but he was limping at less than 2 seconds a lpa difference so there just wasn't time (IMO) anyway imo its the right guy getting 3rd for being actually legal all weekend unlike some
