Despite the hype, neither Qualifying not the Race were great shakes. It was noticable that neither Ricciardo not Vettel could make the final Qually session, despite their younger team mates managing it. Anyway, enough about the track action back to the hype.
There were marshals placed at strategic position in trees around the track to stop 4kg iguanas falling onto the track. The pundits were keen to make sure we all knew about other perils around: concrete walls = guaranteed safety cars, Florida = spontaneous heavy rain, poor quality track = high levels of tire degradation, low level running prior to race = unknown pit strategies, high level of celebrity presence = Paris Hilton.
The first mistake of the race came from Aston Martin, who played it too cool and chilled their petrol to illegally low levels and lost the advantage of good qualifying positions to start from the pit lane.
Not much interest at the start, Zhou retired. The straight line advantage of the Red Bull showed when Verstappen overtook pole-sitter LeClerc on Lap 9 with a wee bit of DRS assistance. The irony here is that it let the Dutchman take off into the distance, eliminating any future overtaking.
Alonso and Gasly seemed to be the headline makers of the race. Alonso showed the field how to have a poor pit stop, which several others tried out too. Notably Sainz but it the long term it did him no damage.
Perez had an interesting argument with his engineers. They told him he definitely was not losing power. Definitely. Told him to try "Fail 50" and later concede he was right.
Then , at last, some of the promised action, it was Lap 41 of 57 and Norris tags Gasly, spinning multiple times. The Virtual Safety Car came out, giving Russell the opportunity he wanted, having earlier decided he would leave his choice of tire up to a time such as this arising or not. Gasly appeared to be struggling with a mechanical problem.
The stewards announced that Alonso was going to be given a 5 second penalty for an earlier knock with Gasly. And the race restarted....with nothing much changing. Bottas was running high in 5th, ahead of both Mercedes. Hamilton had to decide whether to pit under the Safety Car and try some soft tires and lose a position or not to pit and lost position to his team mate because he had old tires. Next thing we know both Mercedes have overtaken Bottas. He keeps trying for Schadenfreude and it never seems to work out. There were no team orders in the German outfit as Russell and Hamilton kept battling it out for 5th and 6th place.
Mick Schumacher was set to score the first points of his career in 9th when his mentor, Vettel crashed in to him putting them both back quite a few places. There is always a silver lining though as Albon was up to 10th, gaining another point for the beleaguered Williams.
The stewards noted an incident involving Magnussen and Vettel, who were nowhere near each other on track. A few laps later a correction came up, which I haven't seen before, it was Schumacher and Ricciardo. Proving it was a dull race and the stewards had dozed off too.
In the end, once he had got past LeClerc, Verstappen held the race lead and never looked like he was going to lose it. I had thought he would make an error but none came, a sign of a driver maturing...or a driver not really put under pressure.
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