ROUND 21: 🇧🇷 Brazil
FORMULA 1 LENOVO GRANDE PRÊMIO DE SÃO PAULO 2024
Circuit stats
- Circuit name: Autódromo José Carlos Pace
- First Grand Prix: 1973
- Number of laps: 71
- Circuit Length: 4.309 km
- Race Distance: 305.879 km
- Lap record: 1:10.540 Valtteri Bottas (2018)
- 2023 winner: Max Verstappen
Track Map
Absolute masterclass from Max. Was just leagues above everyone else.
He also had to remain accident free while overtaking quite a few cars, in a race where there were crashes left right and centre. Sure he got lucky but he also made his own luck by driving an incident free race.
Say what you want about the guy, his attitude, or on track antics oft times, you cannot take today’s drive away from him. I’m not a fan of any of the former, but I concede, begrudgingly, today’s drive proved him to be one of the greats. The belligerent fastest laps at the end of it all were such a statement too. I can’t; I just can’t 😅
I don’t get the Safety Car for “teams are on the wrong tires”. Some had already switched to full wets. Surely this should be up to the teams to screw up instead of relying on the organizers to save them staying out on inters.
Even if everyone was on full wets, they bring it out for visibility and hydroplaning. I think that’s part of the reason no one switched to full wets. They knew if conditions got bad enough to need them, the SC would come out and there might be a red flag too.
From memory, Tsunoda, Lawson, Hulk, Perez, Zhou, and I think there was 1 more. Their strategy was paying off with lap times 3s faster and that was just getting started. Sad to seen a great strategic choice like this turn to shit because teams know the race director will be overly cautious and protect teams from having to make risky strategy calls.
How do you even fix that? At this point driving on the wrong tyre is an optimal strategy. Either:
- Driver stays on inters and calls for red flag cause it’s undrivable
- Driver on inters crashes because they should be on wets, causing a red flag
- someone (like RB today) pits for wets and gets punished because someone else crashed out and caused a red flag
Also I’m not fooled by drivers moaning about how wets suck and have no grip; as long as inters are even 0.1 a lap faster than wets, everyone will want to run inters. I don’t think there’s place for two wet weather compounds since everyone will pick the ‘faster’ one regardles of weather.
Still cannot figure out why Stroll thought it was a good idea to drive through the gravel getting beached after he crashed, he could have made a 180 and stay on the tarmac.
Lando bitching about his luck so much when he had half the race to make progress. Instead he just went backwards.
He lost the lead again and went off a few times and the team topped it off with bad strategy calls (+Lando wanted to come in even earlier) has nothing to do with luck i think.
+Lando wanted to come in even earlier
Exactly. He was asking to be pit even before the VSC and is now bitching that the team pit him
Yeah and in post race interview he said Red Bull’s strategy “was not talent just luck”. Come on dude why so salty.
It is though? I am in no way disregarding Max’s drive, he was brilliant today, but the interview question was specifically about the VSC and red flag, which is 100% luck. Red Bull and Alpine got a free tyre change while every other team lost time and positions for the pit stop.
Plenty of stuff the FIA should fix after this race. They should change the rules to not allow modifications to the car during a red flag in the future for a start.
Edit: You can hear what the interviewer asked here. I don’t think he’s commenting on Max’s drive, just pit strategy. He also did acknowledge the mistakes he made during the race, so there’s that.
The VSC was luck. Pitting neither under the VSC nor under the safety car was a strategic call. Red bull and Alpine both made an educated guess based on the amount rain that there is a high possibility for a red flag. It was lucky but there was plenty of strategy involved. Also all three of them drove brilliantly to put themselves in a position to capitalise. Remember Colapinto binned it on fresh inters while max, ocon and gasly kept it on the track on won’t worn inters. Saying it was 100% luck is doing a disservice to all 3 of them and their teams
I enjoyed this race but once again we have bizarre race direction and stewarding.
