Spain GP Race Report

Max Vestappen has been racing for 5 years now.  Where has the time gone?  He was celebrating 100 races with Red Bull.  A race weekend of hundreds.  And ten hundred in the stands for race day.  Unlike other tracks, most of whom have tried to disguise the stands, Spain felt empty and desolate during qualifying and not much better on race day.  Having a few fans in, you wonder what the atmosphere was like.

With Hamilton starting on pole, the race, as always, was his to lose.  However, no one has won from pole this year.  It was a clean first corner, with Hamilton making a poor start (by a gnat's scrotum) and Verstappen able to get past at the end of the straight. And then headed out by himself.

It was mooted before the race that the teams in the pits could make all the difference in a race.  With a snail-paced 4.2 hour, sorry second, pit stop for Verstappen, could this give the race to Hamilton?  It made no difference.  

Hamilton took a second stop which Verstappen did not, so then it was a waiting game to see whether he was able to overtake Bottas (arf arf) and then overtake Verstappen.  I very much enjoyed all the radio to Bottas: "we are following Lewis", "Lewis is on a different strategy from you", "Lewis is fighting for the win" and finally "Don't hold Lewis up".  In the end, Bottas did not make it easy for him.  A dirty protest there.  The pass for the lead was clean and confident.  With his win, Hamilton equals Senna's record making five consecutive wins on the same track.  It makes me wonder whether Hamilton has some team of archivists squirrelled away somewhere finding records for him to break.  None of this taking into account how many more races there are a season each year.

Verstappen was magnanimous at the end, he "could see it coming" and was a "sitting duck", speaking of working hard to catch up and pleased with the jump forward the team has made.  Button asked Bottas to try and find some positives from the race, he blamed LeClerc for holding him up at the start of the race.  Hamilton could have blamed Verstappen for the same thing.

A new feature for this race was hearing the radio between the teams and race control, namely between Wolff at Mercedes asking for blue flags to signal to Mazepin to let the leader, Hamilton, past.  This has huge potential for more interesting races.

There were lots of tasty overtakes during the race, Sainz on Norris for example, so it's not all doom and gloom and moaning about a boring procession.  If any of the top three had won the race it would have been well earned.  The only question is whether and why Perez is not up there, I guess he can take the Ricciardo defense that he has only just joined the team.   We know Red Bull have no patience with second drivers, he may only retain the seat for a lack of obvious substitutes.

Finally, Williams are very susceptible to wind issues.  Baked beans have been banned in their pit.  Russell finished a creditable 14th however.  Happy days.