F1: With Mexico City ahead this weekend, let's put a wrap on COTA
As the fireworks went off at the Circuit of the Americas when Max Verstappen crossed the finish line, they heralded Red Bull’s first constructor’s championship since 2013, and Verstappen tying the record for the most race victories in a single Formula 1 season.
But despite the historic nature of the result, there was much more to the story, when Formula 1 finally had the race that fans have been waiting for ever since the introduction of the new formula car at the beginning of this year.
Battles flourished throughout the field all day, tires were banged together, and while the sport’s current top star was left standing on top of the podium, a few of the heroes of previous years were able to show that this isn’t just a young man’s game.
Not in on the fun however were the Ferrari fans, despite the team having the two best qualifiers on Saturday. Charles LeClerc was dropped to 12th on the starting grid with an engine change penalty.
And when pole-sitter Carlos Sainz was beaten off the line by Verstappen at the start, he would set the tone for the day when rather than take the safe route into second place, he attempted to cut behind the Red Bull to re-attack the lead, only to get speared by George Russell who was looking at the same piece of road.
Although Russell was ultimately given a five-second penalty (with Sainz being forced to retire from the race), the smash-up was hardly a surprise with the drivers going all out from corner one.
With Verstappen in first and appearing very likely to stay there for the remainder of the day, the immediate fan interest went to Aston Martin, who had followed up a strong qualifying session with a fine race start, joining the two Mercedes drivers and Red Bull’s Sergio Perez, who quickly undid his own five-place grid penalty to move up into fourth place by Lap 5.
Leclerc was in sixth by the time second-running Lewis Hamilton started tire changes on Lap 12, and it was starting to look like another race would unfold with the leaders largely failing to engage in meaningful on-track combat beyond the start.
The first hint that this day would be different was on Lap 18, when Valtteri Bottas, who has seen a fine first half of the season dissolve into dust in the last 10 races, ended up beached in the gravel after being unable to deal with a strong wind gust.
This gave an advantage to hard tire starters Fernando Alonso, Kevin Magnussen and Esteban Ocon, and an even bigger gift to Leclerc and Sebastian Vettel, the only drivers who had stretched out the medium tires from the start, all of whom were able to pit behind the safety car that was needed to clear the Alfa.
Fortune of this type is par for the course, as every team is constantly considering the effects of the appearance of yellow flags, whether well or ill-timed. What happened four laps later, however, was one of those events that takes everything the strategists have done to that point and deposits it straight in the trash.
What exactly led to Alonso launching his Alpine off the back of Lance Stroll’s car is unclear – usually in incidents like this either one driver will take responsibility, or they’ll both blame the other. Perhaps the fact that the two will be teammates in just over four months (with Stroll’s father their boss) had something to do with their mutually calm response.
Nevertheless, the Aston Martin lay in a disfigured heap on the track, while the Alpine, despite doing a wheelie for about two hundred yards (narrowly avoiding flipping over) and then hitting a track barrier, remarkably continued on without noticeable loss of speed. Alonso did need to come into the pits under the safety car to replace his damaged nose cone and took the opportunity to pick up a new set of hard tires, although 34 laps remaining wasn’t the ideal time to grab his final rubber.
Things would settle down a bit until the time came for the leaders to make their second scheduled pit stop. Hamilton had managed to keep within striking range of Verstappen for most of the day, and when the Mercedes came into the pits on Lap 34 to attempt an undercut for the lead, the Red Bull dutifully followed a lap later.
Expecting to emerge with a gap of a second or two, the narrative was changed by a faulty tire gun in the possession of the Red Bull crew, which left Verstappen stranded in the pits for an extra 9 seconds, and then emerging behind not just Hamilton but also Leclerc.
Meanwhile, Sebastian Vettel, who had seemingly everything fall perfectly into place, was now leading the race, although with no chance of stretching his tires much farther before needing to pit and hand back a few positions. Still, his two laps in front brought his career total past 3,500, currently third all-time behind Hamilton and Michael Schumacher.
Now Verstappen was given his marching orders – fix this mess the team made in the pits. Be the best driver, take the best car, and get back to the front.
Meanwhile, the midfield continued to have quite the day of its own. Alonso, driving a vehicle which seemed to be made from some space age metal unavailable to most earthlings, was making its way back up the field, trailed by Lando Norris, another beneficiary of the peculiar events of the day.
With Alpine maintaining a small lead for fourth in the standings over McLaren, and Daniel Ricciardo and Ocon being non-factors on the day, the pressure was on Norris and his better tires to pass his old mentor Alonso, a feat which he would finally accomplish on the last lap.
And they weren’t the only entrants adding to the excitement. Alpha Tauri’s Pierre Gasly had the speed to run in the points all day, but not the discipline. The driver who will be Alonso’s 2023 replacement at Alpine received a penalty for failing to keep proper position during a safety car, and then a second penalty for failing to serve the first correctly.
He managed to avoid an additional punishment for exceeding track limits more time than allowed - a common occurrence on a day where drivers were pushing the limits as far as they would go.
And then there was Vettel's day. While reaching the podium may have been too much to ask, the car’s performance and time at the front was certainly looking like it would be a mid-points finish for the former champion’s final race in Austin.
And then, in what seemed like an instant replay of Verstappen’s saga, the team was unable to get the front-left tire on during his stop. After an excruciating 16.8 seconds waiting for the hardware to work, he finally was able to leave, now all the way back in P13.
While in many races in the past several years that would be the end of the day for the former champion, on this Sunday the Aston was running fast, and Vettel looked like his old self, charging back to eighth place and crossing the finish line yelling like a driver winning his first race.
Meanwhile, Verstappen was doing what he’s done all year. After first dueling with Leclerc to reclaim second, he couldn’t be held off by the underpowered Hamilton, passing him at Lap 50 and claiming the lead and then the victory.
The champ had indeed fixed the team’s mess on this day, and left for the rest of the season only the seemingly easy to answer question of if and when he would break the record for most race wins in a year. Hamilton pulled everything he could out of the car to try and finally get the victory that would continue his streak of a race win in every year since 2007, but the pedal couldn’t be pushed any lower.
If there was ever a way to thrill a crowd with a seventh and eighth place finish, it would be former world champions Alonso and Vettel, who had both seemingly been spat on by fate before coming back to score big points for their soon to be former teams.
But in 2022’s Formula 1, as much as the fans turn out to support their series, it seems like they can never leave completely happy.
The issue was oddly one involving Magnussen, where he had been twice called into the pits by race control for having loose endplates on his front wing that were determined to present a potential danger. Haas has adamantly argued against the need to change the wings, going as far as to present scientific analysis of the situation, to no avail.
So when they saw video of Alonso racing with a loose side mirror following his launch over Stroll, which eventually fell off (ironically as the Alpine driver was passing Magnussen), Haas filed a protest which was upheld, and Alonso was dropped 30 seconds and out of the points.
Through the field
It can’t be a happy office for the Alfa Romeo team, who scored 51 points in the first nine races, and only one additional point in the past 10 events. They now lead the charging Aston Martin team by just one point for seventh place in the standings.
Up Next
F1 takes its regular cross-border trip from Texas to the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez for the Mexico City Grand Prix this weekend. And while the championships are wrapped up, Sergio Perez and Charles Leclerc are separated by only two points for second in the drivers’ championship, while Alpine and McLaren will continue to fight it out for fourth in the constructors battle.