A rain-soaked road caused a strange series of accidents during the Formula 1 sprint in Brazil, in which only carbon was damaged. After the restart of the 24-lap sprint race in Sao Paulo, which was interrupted in lap 8, Lando Norris once again drove his McLaren to the finish line as best on Saturday afternoon (CET), and his teammate Oscar Piastri’s World Championship plans suffered another severe blow after he hit the guardrail. In the final lap, local hero Gabriel Bortoleto flew off violently and hit the track barrier massively. He got out of his racing car independently.
In the sixth lap things suddenly got strange. After a good start on his soft tires, Norris had clearly separated himself from Kimi Antonelli’s medium-tired Mercedes by more than one and a half seconds. But then there was a crash in Turn 3 – three times in quick succession. Curious: The accidents had nothing directly to do with each other, but all three apparently had the same cause.
Wet curbs lead to disaster
Piastri started things off: in the winding curves after the shortest start/finish straight of the current season, the remaining wetness on the track surprised the drivers. After a severe weather warning the evening before, the weather was better than expected and the teams had to rely on slicks as the slopes dried out. But what apparently didn’t lead to any problems for five laps was fatal for some pilots.
When driving over the left curb, the cameras on the racing cars suddenly filmed an unexpected amount of spray. The sudden aquaplaning caused the cars to lose traction, and so Piastri, Nico Hülkenberg, who was excellently placed in tenth place at the time, and Franco Colapinto flew off the track one after the other.
Hülkenberg “limps” into the box
While Colapinto coasted to a stop after hitting the barrier, Hülkenberg got his Sauber back onto the racetrack. Although it was “noseless”, it was otherwise so undamaged that it was able to resume the race later. In the end, however, the veteran couldn’t achieve anything better than 16th place.
After the restart behind the safety car, Norris quickly pulled away again in his orange car, behind which the young Antonelli had to defend himself vigorously against an attack from his teammate George Russell.
Alonso successfully defended himself for a long time
While world champion Max Verstappen finished fourth on the track in Brazil and had no chance of getting one of the podium places, the oldie in the paddock, the Spaniard and former world champion Fernando Alonso, fought against the two Ferraris of Charles Leclerq and Lewis Hamilton. Three laps before the end of the race, the “Prince of Asturias” had to let Leclerq pass – the Ferrari benefited from the excess speed caused by the DRS. But Hamilton can’t get past Alonso.
At the beginning of the last third of the 100 kilometer sprint, the Norris Soft tires seemed to be giving way. Antonelli was able to reduce the gap to less than a second on the 20th lap and caught up with the Brit. But he didn’t let the victory be taken away from him and extended his lead in the World Cup standings to nine points (365).