Max Verstappen led a disrupted first practice session at the Austrian Grand Prix ahead of qualifying later today.
Verstappen looked comfortable at the head of the field for much of the crucial hour and ended his program 0.255s quicker than Charles Leclerc, with a best lap of 1m 6.302s. But no driver squeezed their complete programs into the 60-minute session thanks to two red flags that interrupted running.
The first was for Lando Norris, who parked his McLaren at the side of the road after reporting smoke emanating from beneath his seat, ending his session.
Continue reading on RACERCarlos Sainz won the first Formula 1 race of his career in a sensational British Grand Prix.
Sainz endured a roller-coaster afternoon to claim his maiden win. He started on pole and held the lead with a robust defense on Max Verstappen at the first turn, but he didn’t have the Dutchman’s pace early in the race, and a mistake on lap 10 at Becketts gifted Red Bull Racing first place.
He got the lead back just two laps later when Verstappen dropped deep into the midfield with a puncture and bodywork damage, but now his teammate, Charles Leclerc, was the one applying pressure, with the Monegasque desperate to get past before the charging Lewis Hamilton caught them.
Continue reading on RACERFerrari’s Carlos Sainz topped second practice at the British Grand Prix ahead of a resurgent Mercedes in the hands of Lewis Hamilton.
The Spaniard was lucky to keep his best time, however, of 1m28.942s after running wide at Copse thanks to a combination of his bouncing car and a tailwind down the old pit straight, though he arguably lost time in the second sector as a result anyway.
The lap time being allowed to stand, Sainz ended the session 0.163s quicker than home hero Lewis Hamilton in an encouraging result for Mercedes and its latest major update package.
Continue reading on RACERCarlos Sainz beat world championship leader Max Verstappen to claim his first career Formula 1 pole position in a drenched top-10 shootout at the British Grand Prix.
Rain set in just was the grid-setting hour was set to begin and intensified dramatically just before Q3, soaking the circuit to the point where the intermediate tire was at the limit of its capabilities.
It turned the shootout into a lottery, with times improving with every lap as the standing water was cleared from the track and the rain subsided again.
Continue reading on RACERValtteri Bottas topped a very quiet hour of practice at the British Grand Prix in which only 10 drivers set a lap time.
Heavy rain doused the middle sector of the Silverstone circuit just as the hour-long session started, leaving the track unsuitable for either intermediates or slicks. The entire field nonetheless embarked on at least one installation lap on intermediate rubber, but most did no more than another lap or two before returning to their garages.
Hamilton was the lone exception, rejoining the circuit with 10 minutes remaining to entertain the crowd, clocking up a session-high 10 laps and some very limited aero data for Mercedes’s new upgrade package.
Continue reading on RACERGeorge Russell scored the first pole position of his career by charging to the top spot in the final seconds of qualifying at the Hungarian Grand Prix, after points leader Max Verstappen was forced to withdraw from Q3 with engine problems.
Mercedes had looked out of sorts all weekend, with poor balance on Friday and chronic tire temperature issue during wet Saturday practice, but the W13 switched it on in time for dry qualifying.
Russell wielded the machine to perfection. His first lap split the fancied Ferrari drivers for a provisional front row, but a sublime second lap shaved 0.6s off his personal best to pip Carlos Sainz to top spot by 0.044s, all without having set a single purple sector.
Continue reading on RACERMax Verstappen has fended off a fast-finishing Carlos Sainz to win the Canadian Grand Prix and grow his championship lead.
Verstappen had led Sainz for much of the race after acing his getaway from pole, while the Spaniard lost crucial early seconds stuck behind Fernando Alonso.
Unable to recover the difference on track, the race turned into a potentially strategic grandstand finish when Verstappen made a second pit stop on lap 43, his hard tires aching from a 34-lap stint after an ambitiously early lap 8 stop during a virtual safety car.
Continue reading on RACERMax Verstappen has mastered treacherous conditions in Montreal to take pole position ahead of an outstanding Fernando Alonso at the Canadian Grand Prix.
Verstappen was in a class of his own all afternoon as the track transitioned from soaking wet to almost dry enough for slick rubber.
The Dutchman reeled off three quick laps on intermediate tires, lowering the benchmark by 1.2s through the 12 minutes. Either of his last two would have locked him in for pole, but the final one — a 1m21.299s — got the job done with a 0.645s buffer over Alonso.
Continue reading on RACERFernando Alonso has beaten Pierre Gasly to top spot in a soaking-wet final practice at the Canadian Grand Prix.
After a dry and warm Friday, Formula 1 woke up to a drenched circuit on Saturday morning. Only the wet tire would do for the first 45 minutes of FP3.
With an ambient temperature of just 53 degrees F and the track temperature barely 10 degrees higher, the blue-marked rubber was taking three to four laps to come up to temperature and deliver lap time.
Continue reading on RACERMax Verstappen has pipped Charles Leclerc to top spot in FP2 to sweep Friday practice at the Canadian Grand Prix.
Verstappen looked comfortable immediately on his short run to set the benchmark at 1m14.127s.
Leclerc, who spent the entire session on the soft compound, built up to his ultimate time before clocking in just 0.081s behind.
Continue reading on RACERMax Verstappen topped a blustery first practice session at the Canadian Grand Prix.
Red Bull’s world champion ended the session 0.246s clear of the field after a couple of minor niggles through the hour. The first was an apparent anti-rollbar misconfiguration halfway through the session that required him to pit after three-wheeling over some curbs, and near the end of practice he complained that his power unit’s electrical deployment was clipping at the end of the straights.
Carlos Sainz was next in the order for Ferrari, just 0.1s ahead of Alpine’s Fernando Alonso — whose car was rapid in the flat-out third sector, which comprises just the hairpin and the final chicane. The Spaniard also used the medium tire for his fastest lap, while the rest of the field set their best times on softs.
Continue reading on RACERMax Verstappen empathized with title rival Charles Leclerc’s crippling run of engine failures but says that his team has done a better job of improving his car’s reliability.
Verstappen opened the season with two engine failures in the first three rounds and has suffered a variety of more minor technical niggles throughout his campaign, but he’s yet to finish off the podium when he’s seen the flag, collecting five victories and a third place.
Leclerc, on the other hand, has seen his rock-solid early-season reliability melt away, with two engine retirements of his own in the last three weekends as well as a strategy misstep that cost him victory in Monaco.
Continue reading on RACERLewis Hamilton says he’s never experienced as much pain while driving in Formula 1 as he did during the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, thanks to his Mercedes car’s aggressive bouncing.
All teams have had to deal with either aerodynamic porpoising or their cars bottoming out along Baku’s 1.4-mile straight, but Mercedes suffered most thank to the W13 already being predisposed to the bouncing.
The team clarified during the weekend that in Baku it wasn’t suffering from the same porpoising that afflicted it before the Spanish Grand Prix; instead the car was scraping along the track on the straights because it needs to be run extremely close to the ground to generate performance.
Continue reading on RACERCharles Leclerc has called for Ferrari to ensure its double DNF in Azerbaijan isn’t repeated this season after taking a massive hit to his title campaign.
Leclerc’s power unit blew in a plume of smoke on the front straight on lap 20, forcing his retirement. Teammate Carlos Sainz had stopped with an engine hydraulics leak just 11 laps early, cementing a shocking day at the office for the Italian team.
The double retirement facilitated an easy Red Bull Racing one-two finish with Max Verstappen in the lead, consolidating a 21-point title lead ahead of teammate Sergio Perez. Red Bull Racing also widened its lead over Ferrari in the constructors standings to 80 points.
Continue reading on RACERMax Verstappen has blown open his championship lead with a comfortable victory in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix after both Ferrari drivers retired with mechanical failures.
The race was bubbling into a strategic thriller, with pole-getter Charles Leclerc having made an early pit stop during a virtual safety car on lap 9. The track-wide caution was triggered by Carlos Sainz, whose power unit suffered a hydraulic failure that forced him to park up in the run-off area at Turn 4.
Sergio Perez, having jumped Leclerc for the lead on the first lap, stayed out ahead of teammate Verstappen for a more conventional one-stop strategy that would have squeezed the Monegasque at the end of the race. But the tactics never had a chance to play out, with Leclerc’s power unit popping in the final sector after just 20 laps, forcing him into a costly retirement, his second in three races after the Spanish Grand Prix.
Continue reading on RACERGeorge Russell has doubled down on his calls for Formula 1 to address the “safety limitation” in its new-design 2022 cars, declaring it’s only a matter of time before the chassis bouncing phenomenon, also known as porpoising, results in a significant crash.
Russell spoke out on Friday against the physical toll the bouncing was taking on drivers in Baku, where the long front straight is triggering the phenomenon for virtually all teams to varying extents, more severely than at any circuit this season so far.
Mercedes is arguably the worst affected, with the car intermittently scraping along the ground down the straight as well as moving up and down on its suspension. But after qualifying sixth and 1.3s off the pace on Saturday, Russell said the experience of the car on the limit was so extreme that a crash owing to the bouncing was inevitable.
Continue reading on RACERSergio Perez was in a pole-getting mood on Saturday afternoon in Baku but was left to lament a fuel problem that left the Red Bull driver unable to compete with Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc.
Perez and Leclerc had traded quickest time throughout practice and qualifying in Azerbaijan, and the pole shootout was set to go down to the wire when Red Bull Racing realized it had under-fueled the Mexican’s car ahead of the final runs. It meant Perez had to be held in his garage for refueling, and by the time he rejoined the track, he had lost touch with the pack and had to set his lap without the benefit of the powerful slipstream down 1.4-mile straight.
Ultimately missing out to Leclerc by 0.282s, the Mexican was left to wonder what could have been partway through a particularly competitive weekend.
Continue reading on RACERCharles Leclerc claimed his fourth pole position in a row by dominating qualifying at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
Ferrari held a provisional front-row lockout, but with Carlos Sainz leading a slightly scrappy Leclerc, the drivers battling with grip on a cooling track fast approaching sunset.
Sainz was first out among the front-runners for the second runs, but it was the Spaniard’s turn to struggle, and after some snaps of oversteer in the first few corners, his pole challenge was as good as over at the end of the first split.
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