Russell and Piastri were away quicker than Lerclerc. There was quickly some separation between the cars at the front. Unusually, Antonelli went backwards rather than forwards off the grid, losing a place. The Red Bulls were flying, Verstappen made up three places in three laps and Hadjar up in front of him was flying as well. On Lap four, Hadjar got passed Leclerc for a podium place. It would have been nice for Hadjar to get a podium but he had to give the place up to Verstappen. Would this turn out to be the best strategy for them?
On Lap nine, a potential problem, Stroll was called on to stop his car, which he managed to do at a good place where he was right off the track; no controversial VSC would be needed. Alonso would also retire before we were half way through the race as well.
After twenty laps Antonelli was in a position to score one point but we had not been shown one of his overtakes in full screen. At the front however, Hadjar was calling to be let past Verstappen because he was close behind on medium tyres.
On Lap 30 I was wondering whether anyone had made a pit stop as we hadn't been shown any. In fact, we had only watched Verstappen and Hadjar not-battle for many, many laps. The other teams needed to do something to get some airtime for their sponsors. Norris locked up his brakes, went wide and had to do a big loop to continue. Not to be outdone, Albon put his Williams nose-first into the barrier, excellent promotion for Barclays (Fred the Shred is finally vindicated). There was a Yellow Flag then a Safety Car but who was past the pit lane entry? The question for teams was whether a Red Flag would be put out shortly and no pit stop would be needed for the whole race and a pit under Safety Car would be a mistake. The Red Bulls would need to double-stack.
The restart was wild: everyone was weaving back and forth to pick up heat in their tyres and it looked like Russell was taking it too far. I thought everyone was going to get passed him but off he went. Verstappen was ready to pounce though and passed Piastri. Behind them it was chaos with half a dozen drivers running into each other around a corner: no one seemed to stop they just kept sliding into the next car. I don't know how Norris got involved in it from ninth position but he was out. The Safety Car was immediately back out with no break for Mylander. Colapinto had been in too tight a space and ran out of braking room and into his team mate Gasly, they both slid into Norris. Meanwhile Linblad T-boned Lawson; he was pushed off the track but manged to get going again. Somehow lucky Antonelli got through it all safely.
Colapinto was apologising immediately. The Alpine Team Principal was off the pit wall and across to shout and I can only imagine what Briatore will say to him and on Netflix. I imagine his phone has "run out of battery".
With the race about to restart again, Verstappen was ready to push past Russell. As the pack being six cars down, this was a clean start. Antonelli was in seventh with both Ferraris, both Red Bulls and Piastri between him and his championship-challenging team mate. Hadjar was pushing Piastri for third place and the Australian locked up and went wide where Norris had. This dropped him back to 15th; Villeneuve called this a rookie mistake. An awful weekend for McLaren too. And Antonelli was up into sixth.
Then Antonelli was passed Hamilton and Verstappen was getting closer and closer to Russell and he started to panic. Race Control suddenly said that they were investigating Verstappen for not following race director's instructions (nothing came of it). Russell managed to pull out the crucial one second gap but with two laps to go it was down to half a second and everyone would be holding their breath for the three minutes until the end of the race. Somehow I looked up again and Russell had found something and it was a second again. To add to the comfort for George, there were Yellow Flags for them to get past Bottas who had put his car into the barriers on the last lap. There was a tenth of second in it with Hadjar getting a very well-deserved podium in third. Linblad overtook Ocon almost on the line. The final points-scoring ten were Russell, one tenth of a second ahead of Verstappen, Hadjar, Leclerc (who had a very quiet race), Antonelli, Hamilton, Linblad, Ocon, Bearman (lots of points for Haas) and Sainz (Williams should have scored a lot more points this weekend).
Red Bull played the strategy game very well and it does feel that Verstappen should have earned a win so far this season. Some drivers really earned their stripes during this race and others just didn't seem to be able to join the dots and achieve as much as they should.
Seven cars did not finish the race so it was a tricky one to either keep it on the track or avoid being collateral damage. Norris said Colapinto should be given a one race ban for the incident, as though he has never done anything like that.
There will mechanics locked up in containers to try and fix the damage before Free Practice in Bahrain/Malaysia. It's a triple-header with a week off before another. Tough for the mechanics, tough for the drivers and even tougher for us F1 bloggers.
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