World champion Max Verstappen has secured the victory at the Grand Prix of the Emilia Romagna. The Dutch showed an outstanding start of racing and held the two McLaren pilots Lando Norris and Oscar Piatri behind. In the World Cup ranking, the Red Bull driver nibbled some of the lead of the two McLaren employees on Sunday in the 400th Grand Prixs of his team.
In the table of the driver’s ranking, Piatri continues with 146 points ahead of teammate Norris with 133 and Verstappen, which now comes to 124 points. After the catastrophic qualifying, Ferrari took halfway damage limitation: Lewis Hamilton finished fourth, Charles Leclerc temporarily finished sixth. After qualifying with the Italian media, a disaster was mentioned, the Tifosi cheered every trip by the red racing cars. The enthusiasm of the Italians for their sports car brand is unbroken.
Good updates and Top voting work At Red Bull
Red Bull already laid the foundation stone for Verstappen’s outstanding success before the training sessions. Because technical updates and top tuning work between the free training sessions made the Dutch car really quickly. The four -time world champion used the excellent material perfectly: with constantly fast lap times, he developed a lead over Lando Norris and expanded it up to half the race to 18 seconds.
On the one hand, Verstappen was able to benefit from his team-mate Yuki Tsunoda, who braked the Piatri, ordered early for pit stop and also from a virtual safety car because of the failure of Esteban Ocon in the Haas: During the slow ride, the Red Bull Pilot completed his first pit stop and division ten seconds.
Hülkenberg’s struggle for points
Further back in the field, Nico Hülkenberg fought for points in the clean: The veteran passed in the 40th round past the even older colleague Fernando Alonso and was tenth. However, Williams driver Carlos Sainz lurked from behind, whose car is clearly superior to that of the Emmericher in the current season. Accordingly, the joy of the last point was brief. The German slipped again in tenth place for a short time, but Hülkenberg had to be satisfied with 12th place.
Problemless restart
Tension occurred in the final phase of the race when the Safety Car was ordered on the route because of the technical failure of Kimi Antonelli in the Mercedes. While the German veteran Bernd Mayländer piloted the great Aston Martin around the route and braked the field, Verstappen lost its entire lead. Piatri lurked close behind the four -time world champion, team -mate Norris sparked: “Piatri’s tires don’t look good. Maybe it would be better if I followed Verstappen?” The fourth -placed Charles Leclerc at this time also gave his thoughts: “My tires feel bad. I don’t know if there stay in the points at all.”
Norris then squeezed past Piatri five laps before the end and quickly settled very clearly. At Piatri, the pit stop strategy raised questions because the Australian was on the most crazy tire in the final phase and had no chance to fight hard for second place or maybe even one.
Leclerc fought a hard fight in the hot phase of the race with Albon in Williams and was backed back in the penultimate round because he had pushed the Thai from the route: he had to let Albon pass and became fifth.