Max Verstappen repelled a late attack by Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz to secure his sixth victory in nine Canadian Grand Prix races and take full control of the 2022 Formula One title battle.
These are our conclusions from Montreal:
Verstappen looks unstoppable in the 2022 title race
ᴀ ʀᴀᴄᴇ 🔥
It was tricky with the strategy because of the security cars, but luckily we were able to make it work in the end @redbullracing 🙌 pic.twitter.com/ijmPh9iI60
– Max Verstappen (@ Max33Verstappen) June 19, 2022
He was almost never questioned from the moment the penalty on Charles Leclerc’s grid was confirmed on Friday.
Until, suddenly, with a Ferrari right behind him with cooler tires behind the Safety Car, he was left in great doubt.
But if Verstappen was completely unperturbed when Lewis Hamilton breathed through his neck in Austin last year, he was unlikely to be bothered by Sainz’s vision in his mirrors and face him with apparent immunity to pressure. which has become a mark of man. .
With six victories in nine races, Verstappen’s 2022 has more and more the air of Hamilton’s 2015 or Sebastian Vettel’s 2011, let’s call it year after year, when the serenity and security it entails winning a hard-fought World Championship together raises both. team and pilot at a whole new level of performance.
Forty-six points ahead of teammate Sergio Pérez, Verstappen now leads the drivers’ standings with the exact margin ahead of Charles Leclerc after the first three rounds, highlighting the speed of the title change. .
If Ferrari has been its worst enemy in recent weeks, Pérez’s DNF on suspicion of a gearbox problem after seven laps in Canada acted as a reminder that there is also a fragility underlying Red Bull. which has been fighting the problems of big and small cars from the beginning. of the season.
At this point, the lack of reliability is the only hope that the rest have to catch Verstappen, whose five victories in the last six races, each easier than the last, have the unmistakable smell of domination.
Sainz may not have a better chance of winning in 2022
After overcoming his crisis at the start of the season, Sainz has been getting closer to his first Grand Prix victory in recent weeks.
Just trapped behind a car surrounded by him, he felt that it prevented him from winning in Monaco, where his instinctive intelligence to invent his own strategy from the cockpit allowed him to avoid falling into the same trap as the his teammate Leclerc.
With Leclerc serving a penalty on the grid, Sainz, for once, was Ferrari’s main target in Montreal, although the classification was held in the humid conditions in which he has always prospered, Sainz was a distant third. , eight tenths of a pole position and behind Fernando Alonso’s Alpine.
It was, in short, the kind of gap Leclerc would have fit into on a normal weekend.
Sainz drove to a routine race until the second position of the race until the missing Safety Car offered the potential for much more, giving him a free stop and the opportunity to start directly behind Verstappen with six-lap tires. cooler.
He tried, God knows he tried, but not once during the remaining laps did he make a serious attack on the leadership.
Again, you may be wondering, if Leclerc had been in this position, would he have found a way to overcome Verstappen?
Sainz received applause, not only from Ferrari but also from Red Bull mechanics, when he got out of his car in the closed park, runner-up for the fifth time since September 2020 and third this season.
After another almost failed, he will feel that his first victory is just around the corner.
But still, with his teammate out of contention and circumstances changing in his favor at the end of the race, he may not have a better chance than this.
Reports of Lewis Hamilton’s disappearance are highly exaggerated
Lewis Hamilton: “Obviously it’s different from a win, but I think it feels as good as that in a way.
“I’ve had a quarter and a third and it’s finally coming back a little bit of consistency, so I’m definitely grateful and I know we can do better and I can do more.” #CanadianGP 🇨🇦 # F1 pic.twitter. com / aPP6XaIY89
– PlanetF1 (@ Planet_F1) June 19, 2022
Another brief glimpse of how exhausting the 2022 season has been for Hamilton came at the end of FP2 on Friday afternoon.
“This car is so bad,” he murmured sincerely as he waited for his interview to begin at the end of the day, before repeating the phrase first uttered at the Australian GP in April that nothing Mercedes has to do with the miserable W13 seems do harm. noticeable difference.
He seemed almost lost, as he hinted that the limitations of his car, which he had described as “untenable” by the team’s radio, had hampered his enjoyment of the Montreal circuit, where he got so memorable the first of the 103 Grand Prix victories in 2007.
But the night is darker just before dawn, and by Sunday afternoon his mood had completely changed.
Hamilton looked much more excited after reaching 4th place, his highest position on the grid of the year, in the humid conditions of the standings, comparing his emotions to the wonderful joy of his debut season.
And when he turned his place on the grid into a first podium since the Bahrain GP, which opened the season, after being the fastest car on track for a while before the end of the Safety Car period, he admit to feeling a little overwhelmed.
“It’s been such a tough year for me personally when it comes to the car,” Hamilton said after the race. “The classification was emotional for me and back in the garage we were like ‘wow, that’s nice for us.’
“So having a strong career only gives me a lot of hope and confidence ahead.”
Just in time for his home run at Silverstone next time …
Magnussen’s naturally combative approach is costing Haas
A sad Steiner about what could have been in the #CanadianGP # HaasF1 pic.twitter.com/RpJD63l0ir
– Haas F1 Team (@ HaasF1Team) June 19, 2022
After scoring in three of the first four races of 2022, Haas has found it a little harder to score points in recent weeks.
And with the team admitting to Canada that their only major improvement of the season is likely to be delayed until the Hungarian GP at the end of July, it’s unclear how many more opportunities they will have to add to their account.
That’s why the team was so excited about their performance in the standings, as the two Haas cars lined up among the top six on the grid for the first time in almost four years.
The natural touch and feel of a race car that took Kevin Magnussen to fourth place on the sprint grid in Imola was good enough for the P5 in equally humid conditions to qualify in Canada, where he was joined in the third row by teammate Mick Schumacher.
There has been much to admire about Magnussen since his unexpected return to F1 in March, but there are also indications of why he occasionally made team manager Guenther Steiner despair during his original period. with the team.
Magnussen missed his last position in the top 10 on the grid when an opportunistic move outside Hamilton failed on the first lap in Barcelona, condemning him to a miserable career that eventually ended two laps below. .
Once again, he found himself next to Hamilton on the first lap in Canada and again came out worse, damage to the end of the front wing that resulted in a black and orange flag and a last place.
There was a time when they were approaching the chicane of curves 3 and 4, when Magnussen could have withdrawn from the movement and got behind a car that was unlikely to overtake him along the way. career?
His offensive, abrasive and uncompromising approach has won Magnussen many fans and a few enemies over the years.
But at a time when his team needs all the points he can get, his natural eagerness to fight raja in being irresponsible.
Zhou could not wish for a better mentor than Bottas
While Magnussen is struggling to bring Haas to regular points, the opposite goes to Valtteri Bottas, who has scored in all but two races so far this season.
Bottas has been in the habit of recovering well from the interrupted Fridays of 2022, with the Safety Car arriving at the perfect time to execute a one-stop strategy and finish seventh in Canada, but for the second consecutive weekend it was surpassed. in the classification. by his teammate.
If Bottas has been eliminating his problems earlier this season, Zhou Guanyu has borne the brunt of Alfa Romeo’s unreliability in racing conditions after retiring from three of the four grand prix. previous.
His failure to add to the point he scored in his F1 debut in Bahrain has masked the quiet progress Zhou has been making, with the Chinese driver making his most complete performance to date in Montreal. where he finished eighth after reaching Q3 for the first time. in wet.
Zhou said Bottas’ influence has been “definitely the key” to his post-qualification development, and revealed that the former Mercedes driver has been “very helpful so far this season”.
Bottas, on the other hand, was “very happy” for Zhou at the end of the race, adding: “I think my teammate can gain a lot of confidence this weekend and I’m sure now we can be. very evenly matched and get more points together “.
Could we witness the emergence of another F1 bromance in Alpha?