'Still too early to be racing in Qatar': F1 drivers go flat-out in hellish GP

A day after sealing his third world championship in the sprint race, Max Verstappen took his 14th grand prix victory of the season. It was comfortable in the sense of being able just to pace himself back to the following McLaren of Oscar Piastri (winner of the sprint race). But it was far from comfortable in the extreme heat of the cockpit on an October evening in Qatar. The physical challenge was right on the edge of feasible. Logan Sargeant retired ill, Esteban Ocon threw up in his helmet, George Russell felt on the verge of losing consciousness towards the end, Alex Albon and Lance Stroll headed straight to the medical centre after the race with heat exhaustion. It was a few weeks too early to be racing in Qatar.

What made the physical challenge even more extreme was that the race was a flat-out sprint in between three pit stops, just like in tyre war years. This time it was imposed, though. A potential delamination of the compound from the carcass resulting from being run at high speed over the new ‘pyramid’ kerbs meant an 18-lap limit was imposed on each set of tyres. Which over a 57-lap race meant three stops. But 18 laps was way before the performance of the tyre had significantly degraded. So the fastest way to run the race was to run flat-out. Which was something of a novelty after years of tyre management. But also extremely arduous in the heat around this super-fast track.

But regardless of any of that, the McLaren was genuinely almost Red Bull fast around here. Lando Norris had both his Q3 laps deleted for track limits and would otherwise have started second less than 0.3sec behind Verstappen even with a scruffy lap. His best sectors suggested he could have contended for pole had either of his laps been as error-free as Verstappen’s first Q3 effort. In the hotter conditions of sprint qualifying the following day the McLarens locked out the front row, Piastri on pole after Norris blew what would have been pole at the final corner. But both of them marginally faster than Verstappen. That was the foundation for Piastri’s sprint win. Putting aside the anomaly of Singapore, this is the hardest Verstappen’s Red Bull had been pushed all season. The MCL60 was genuinely close here. In the Sunday race Verstappen’s margin over Piastri was never more than eight seconds.

But even though Norris and Piastri had recorded the second and fourth fastest times for the Grand Prix proper, their respective grid positions of P10 and P6 once their over-the-line laps were deleted had Mercedes second and third on the grid with George Russell and Lewis Hamilton. The Merc wasn’t quite as quick over a lap as the McLaren, which really was sensationally fast in the long quick corners which comprise much of the circuit, but it’s good on its tyres and was close enough on pace that with the advantage of track position afforded by the McLaren grid penalties should logically have been Verstappen’s closest challenger.

Except it didn’t quite work out like that. Hamilton made a catastrophic error of judgement into the first corner which resulted in a collision between the two Mercs, one which put him out of the race on the spot and left Russell restarting at the back needing to pit to check for damage. Hamilton had been poised, on his grippier soft compound tyres, to go around the outside of the medium-tyred Verstappen and Russell but cut in too tightly, leaving Russell nowhere to go.

The softs had shown the day before they were good only for a handful of laps but fired up much faster than the mediums. If Hamilton was to maximise his strategy he really needed to get track position at the start and had already on the lap to the grid been pondering that he felt a ‘sitting duck on these tyres’. He’d chosen to start on them because the 18-lap maximum for each set of tyres (including laps they had already done in the weekend up to that point) had left him with the choice of using a set of mediums already with 11 laps on them (so which could therefore have been run only for seven laps) somewhere in his race or starting on a brand new set of softs. The plan was to run the softs to lap 8. That would leave him a set of mediums which could do 13 laps and a new set each of hards and mediums. Those tyres would remain in the garage and after seeing footage of the incident Hamilton took full responsibility for the debacle.