Max Verstappen reached yet another milestone and won his 50th Grand Prix, this time at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. The Dutchman narrowly won ahead of a chasing Lewis Hamilton who got later disqualified along with Charles Leclerc. Lando Norris celebrated his 100th race with a second-place trophy and Carlos Sainz was promoted to third after the race.
Lando Norris, who started on the first row next to Charles Leclerc, had a much better start off the line and immediately overtook the Ferrari number 16. The young Brit then pulled away quickly, stretching the lead to over 1.7s by the end of the inaugural lap. Norris later lost the lead to Max Verstappen and was third to cross the finish line.
While Lewis Hamilton was perhaps a couple laps short of a victory, Max Verstappen successfully held off the late charge of the 7-time world champion, who was later disqualified as his car failed a post-race check from the FIA. Hamilton’s disqualification promoted his fellow countryman, Lando Norris to second.
Hamilton’s skid blocks underneath his W14 were worn too thin, breaching F1’s technical regulations and costing him his second-place finish and a good amount of championship points that would have brought him closer to finishing second in the 2023 world championship. Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari failed the same test, costing the Scuderia a sixth-place finish.
This raised the question of whether the Sprint weekend format needs to be adjusted as it currently puts an increased amount of pressure on the ten teams and their cars. With already limited practice, the sprint race weekend is potentially wasting the teams resources as they are sacrificing their Grand Prix performance. This weekend, 4 cars, out of 20 started the main event on Sunday from the pit lane, preferring to break Parc Fermè in order to be able to change their set-up, hoping for a more competitive running.
“This is not ideal or necessary, and while I don't like us to keep messing with the format, we must make some changes for next season and beyond. It's too much of a lottery which has far reaching consequences, as we would find out several hours after the Sunday GP.” -Martin Brundle for Sky Sports
Nevertheless, Lewis Hamilton and his team from Brackley will surely take away the positives from this weekend as they finished ‘only’ +2.225 seconds behind Max Verstappen and were catching him quickly in the ending laps. Max Verstappen, who had already secured his third championship with five races to spare, seems a bit scattered and under pressure from Lewis Hamilton as the Dutchman had a brake issue on his RB19.
While Max Verstappen managed to win, yet again, both races this weekend, we saw him work for them harder than we’ve come to expect this season. Mercedes, McLaren and Ferrari are hunting down the Red Bull team and if their competitiveness can carry over to next year, we are in for an exciting season.
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