Fernando Alonso made a front-row start for the first time since 2012. Photo / Don Kennedy
Don Kennedy on Formula One
World champion Max Verstappen has won the Canadian Grand Prix for the first time, to add that race to the growing number on his F1 resume. In recording his sixth win of the season in nine races, Verstappen notched up F1 career victory number 26.
He now has a 46-point lead in the championship over his Red Bull teammate, Sergio Perez, who didn’t finish the race, and 49 ahead of Ferrari driver Charles LeClerc, who started from the near the rear of the grid after taking a grid penalty for changing an engine, and finished 5th.
But it was the other Ferrari driver, Carlos Sainz, who started third and finished second, who pushed Verstappen all the way to the line to ensure this was no Sunday drive around the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, which is situated on Notre Dame Island on the St Lawrence River in Montreal.
For the first half of the race poles-sitter Verstappen looked set to drive away with a relatively easy victory, but a crash on lap 49 of 70 for Yuki Tsunoda in the Alpha Tauri, brought out the Safety-Car and gave Sainz the opportunity to attack Verstappen in the closing laps, which he did. But catching is one thing, overtaking another.
Verstappen had taken pole position in wet conditions by six-tenths of a second from Fernando Alonso in the Alpine. It meant Alonso would start a race from the front row for the first time since 2012. Verstappen was quick to acknowledge Alonso’s feat.
“To be on the front row together with Fernando, I mean, I used to look at F1 as a little kid and seeing Fernando being up there and winning his races and championships and putting it on poles,” Verstappen explained.
“So, to be sharing the front row is a nice thing, you know. I mean, of course Fernando is getting a bit old but he’s still very fast. I know he starts very well you know, so I have to be ready. “
Alpine team boss Otmar Szafnauer was impressed with Alonso’s effort.
“That was the best qualifying yet for me at Alpine,” Szafnauer said. “It just shows that sometimes experience plays a bigger factor than the exuberance of youth. The older we get, the more we’d like to say that.”
Alonso said with a cheeky grin on his face that he hoped to overtake Verstappen at the start of race but realistically said P5 or P6 was probably the best he could hope for given the way the Alpine car has performed this year.
As it transpired he would finish 7th in the race but was then given a nine-second penalty for weaving on the straight on the last lap to stop Valtteri Bottas in the Alfa Romeo passing him. For Alonso, the two virtual safety-car deployments worked against him, but his real problem was an ailing engine that meant he was a second a lap slower than he could have been. At least we had a bit of vintage Alonso in qualifying, who at age 40 shows little sigh of slowing down.
In reality Alonso was never going to threaten Verstappen, but thanks to the safety-car intervention on lap 49, Sainz became a winning factor. He put the pressure on all the way to the finish, but Verstappen is at the top of his game, and it will take a mighty effort from Ferrari in the next few races to stop Max becoming a two-time champion.
“The safety car didn’t help,” Verstappen said when asked how he had withstood Sainz’s challenge. “I think, overall they [Ferrari] were very quick in the race so it would have been really tough to close the gap at the end. It was really exciting at the end. I was giving it everything I had. Of course, Carlos was doing the same.”
“Luckily, this year we seem really quick on the straight so that helps a lot.”
This was the fifth time Sainz has finished second, but that first win after 149 F1 starts is still proving elusive.
“This weekend I was quicker for the first time, I want to say all season, but for the first time in the championship,” Sainz said. “I was all over the place, close to walls, you know, with confidence-ragging it, and I felt comfortable out there so it’s a pity not to have got the first win.”
Third place went to Lewis Hamilton in the much improved but universally maligned Mercedes, which team boss Toto Wolff called a “sh##box” after the Baku race when apologizing to Hamilton for giving him a sore back due to “porpoising” which is now described as “bouncing.”
In 1991 Ferrari sacked Alain Prost with one race to go in the season, for describing his car as being like a “truck”. One can only guess Wolff won’t be sacked because he is a shareholder in the company and its probably okay for the boss to criticize the team, but not acceptable if a three-time world champion employee, which Prost was at the time, is critical.
Mercedes has been bleating to the FIA about needing to change the new regulations, because they have created a safety problem for some of the teams. But Mercedes have little support for their concerns, with other team bosses pointing out that raising the height of the car would solve the problem, but have a detrimental effect on performance.
However, the FIA has been listening to Mercedes’s moans and groans, because it announced new measures to protect the drivers from the impact of porpoising, which seemed to affect Hamilton the most, given he could hardly extract himself from his car in Baku.
Former F1 driver John Watson, who won five grand prix in the mid-70s and early 80s, said Hamilton needed to stop acting like a “pantomime dame”.
“Lewis needs to be careful not to act like a pantomime dame,” he told the Daily Mail.
“It is a very difficult car to drive but at 37 the bones are not as forgiving in an uncomfortable ride. This is a whole new world for Lewis. He has had seven or so years when Mercedes has been dominant and its perhaps a seven- year itch George [Russell] looked pretty fresh afterwards and finished third to Lewis’s fourth.”
“Lewis maybe needs to recalibrate and spend less time in the air and more in the gym,” Watson added.
It would seem that Hamilton took Watson’s advice because this weekend he was faster than Russell, who finished 4th, to continue his somewhat remarkable feat of finishing in the top five in all nine races held so far.
It looks like the FIA has come to the aid of Hamilton and Mercedes, by changing the rules not even halfway through the season, something that Red Bull boss Christian Horner finds unacceptable, with agreement on that from Ferrari team principal, Mattia Binotto.
Wollf has said that team bosses were playing “political games” in respect of porposing, and “manipulating” what drivers were saying to protect their “competitive advantage or gain it”. He said the behavior of those team bosses was “pitiful”.
There was a meeting in Canada when these issues were discussed by the teams, with reports that Wolff and Red Bull boss Christian Horner, had a heated exchange.
Mercedes arrived in Montreal with reinforcement available for the floor of the cars, given the FIA had cleared the way for teams to do that. Other teams were skeptical as to how Mercedes could have done that given there were only five days between the Baku race and Friday practice.
Did someone in the FIA give Mercedes a tip off? A Mercedes team member said they had people who flew late to Montreal and brought the material with them. Apparently it didn’t work, with Hamilton saying after Friday practice the car was worse.
By late Sunday afternoon after standing on the podium at the circuit where he had his first win in F1 in 2007, and where he has won six more times since, a reformed Hamilton with no apparent back issues, was back to his gushing best in praising his team and his own performance.
“Obviously its different to a win but I think it feels as good as that in a sense,” Hamilton said. “I’ve had a fourth and a third and a bit of consistency is coming back finally, so I’m definitely grateful and I know we can do better and I can do more.”
Hamilton was of course helped by Perez retiring with a gearbox issue and Leclerc starting at the back of the grid. When both Red Bulls and Ferraris finish, they are normally some distance up the road from the two Mercedes, but there is no doubt the eight-time Constructors’ champions are well on their way back.
The next race is at Silverstone on July 4 where last year Verstappen was punted off by Hamilton on the first lap. A month ago he may have thought Hamilton would be no where near him this time around, but if Wolff gets his way with the FIA, and Hamilton literally puts his back issues behind him, they could yet be on another collision course.
– Sources: Red Bull Racing, F1.com, Sky Sports F1
