Max Verstappen wins French Grand Prix with late pass

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In May, Mercedes AMG F1 won the Spanish Grand Prix by bringing Lewis Hamilton into the pit lane late for an additional stop, putting him in position to catch up all the time on the track. Today Red Bull got Mercedes back by reversing the situation and enabling Max Verstappen to overtake the entire field with just enough time to win the race. In both cases, the driver pulled it off.

While Verstappen started from pole and held the lead in Turn 1, a slide off the track gave Hamilton the lead almost immediately in Turn 2. The Mercedes and Red Bull appeared to be even throughout the race, which allowed Verstappen to stay on par with Hamilton during the first stint and take the lead with an aggressive undercut at the first stop. Hamilton fell just short of second place but what bothered him was that he also had slightly newer tires, which added Verstappen further into his wear cycle and gave his team the earlier opportunity to make another stop.

Red Bull did so while Verstappen was in the lead, adding an extra stint to their strategy with a used set of mid-size tires from qualifying. With the Verstappen team making the pick from the top and doing so so early, it was effectively a major undercut against a Mercedes pit stop that never actually took place. After taking the lead with the first undercut, Verstappen gained so much time against a theoretical change of strategy for Hamilton that Mercedes had no choice but to keep Hamilton ahead and hope that he could keep the lead for so long. that Verstappen never got into DRS range. Both stops were precisely timed and executed excellently.

The Red Bull stopped 20 laps before the end. It took 11 laps for Verstappen to catch up and overtake Valtteri Bottas, whose only task in this race was to slow the Red Bull driver down as long as possible. It was a brave effort, but not brave enough. The lead had shrunk to 3 seconds five laps before the end, then one second two seconds before the end. That was enough to get within DRS range, and the Mercedes had no real counterattack for repeated attacks by a car with DRS and better tires. Verstappen made his move just before the final lap, Hamilton had no chance to defend and the 23-year-old Red Bull Racing ace has one of the most memorable wins of his career.

After the catastrophic tire damage from the lead for Verstappen in the last race and the atypical late mistake for Hamilton in the last race mutually destroyed, today’s win for Verstappen, 12 points behind Hamilton, puts him in the best championship position of his career. Verstappen is now 47 points behind third-placed Sergio Perez, almost two full weekends at possible points.

The constructor’s rating is a different story. Thanks to the win that Perez saved for Red Bull Racing after the Verstappen crash in Baku and a nice late pass to make Bottas third today, the team has now won three races in a row and leads the teams’ championship at 37 Points at.

Lando Norris, arguably the best rider outside of the elite teams this season, finished today’s race in a familiar fifth place, just ahead of teammate Daniel Ricciardo after the team split up their strategies early on. Pierre Gasly from AlphaTauri, Fernando Alonso from Renault and the Aston Martin duo Sebastian Vettel and Lance Stroll rounded off the points. Notably, a 12th place finish for George Russell Williams resulted in a tiebreaker against Haas F1, another team that haven’t scored a single point this season, for ninth place in the battle of the ten teams.

Red Bull Racing is at its best before successive races on its home track, the former A1-Ring, now named after the energy drink giant. The first, the Styrian Grand Prix, will be held next Sunday.

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