Victorious for the 3rd time in front of his home crowd, Max Verstappen tied Sebastian Vettel’s 2013 record for most consecutive victories on Sunday, winning his 9th consecutive race and his 11th of the season. Red Bull, in dominating fashion, took home their 13th victory of the season in what has been a largely unchallenged romp to their current 100% win rate, and cemented their 14th victory in a row stretching back to Abu Dhabi 2022.
Changing weather conditions made for a chaotic race as teams were immediately swamped with a deluge of rain on the first lap. With every driver on slicks, the field began pitting for intermediate tires almost instantly as the lead of the race shuffled from Verstappen, to Norris, to Russell, to Perez, and eventually back to Verstappen as green-flag stops completed by lap 7 and the field began to wait out the trajectory of the race as more rain was seen on the radar.
Ferrari and Charles LeClerc were caught in another pit-stop blunder as the Monegasque correctly called for intermediates on lap 1, following the Red Bull of Perez into pit lane on a similar strategy, but ended up in a pit box with mechanics in position with no tires. Although the stop was slow with significant time lost, the team was convinced that even with the delay they would have lost more time on a wet track with slick tires and that the blunder was not as terrible as it seemed.
On lap 62 the field was frozen as race control red-flagged the race. The pending rain had arrived with a vengeance and caught several drivers off track, including the Alfa Romeo pair of Bottas and Zhou (who would retire due to contact with the turn 1 wall), Lewis Hamilton, and Sergio Perez.
With the field gathered and the race restarted, Verstappen held off a charging Fernando Alonso in the final laps before crossing the line ahead of the Spaniard and teammate Perez. Perez however, would be assessed a 5-second time penalty, dropping him to 4th position and promoting Alpine’s Pierre Gasly to the podium, the teams second of the year.
Further down the order, a new face made his Formula 1 debut filling in for an injured Daniel Ricciardo after the Alpha Tauri driver broke his wrist in a practice accident Friday afternoon. Red Bull’s former DTM standout Liam Lawson was called in to fill the seat and with limited running, smart racecraft, and unpredictable conditions, brough home a 13th place finish for the team, beating out his more experience teammate of Yuki Tsunoda.
Formula 1: Riccardo crashes to avoid Piastri
Formula 1 heads to the Cathedral of Speed in Monza for the 2023 Italian Grand Prix this weekend, with the race on Sunday at 15:00 local time (9:00am EST)
