Imola race showed why Verstappen is unstoppable in F1
Red Bull suffered another 'off weekend' but it was the three-time world champion that meticulously guided them to victory.
It was the ultimate slow burner. Max Verstappen's smallest win margin yet in 2024 over Lando Norris when he crossed the line just 0.725s ahead, following a thrilling head-to-head duel in the final ten laps of the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.
The Dutchman showed why he's unstoppable at the minute in F1, while McLaren will be gutted they didn't take advantage of Red Bull's second 'off weekend' in a row.
It's even more remarkable when you consider that just 12 hours before the race, Verstappen was doing a stint for his Team Redline iRacing team in a virtual edition of the 24 hours of Nurburgring - which they went on to win.
Did he get much sleep beforehand?
“I would say enough! About seven hours. I would prefer to sleep a bit more, but seven for me on a race weekend is absolutely fine.”
Verstappen needed to be alert to the threat posed by McLaren. Although they no longer flanked him at the start, owing to a grid penalty for Oscar Piastri for impeding Kevin Magnussen in qualifying, Lando Norris was alongside on the unusually curved start/finish straight.
The crucial first few laps for Verstappen were spent extending the gap to Norris, first getting him outside of the DRS zone, then getting clear of any undercut threat by creating a six-second buffer between him and his most recent challenger.
Norris was losing the majority of his time through the tricky Variante Alta chicane to Verstappen, as McLaren was wary of letting him push too early due to the degradation on the rear tyres being higher than anticipated.
Pirelli had brought its softest compounds to this weekend, with the medium being the C4 rather than the usual C3. This turned out to be a key piece of information for the race and the reason why, as team principal Christian Horner put it, Red Bull’s afternoon turned into a “race of two halves.”
After the first round of pit stops, it was looking more like the fight would be with Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc for Norris. The McLaren driver was puzzled as to why he was losing so much time to those behind him, before engineer Will Joseph reassured him: “Lando, they are using their tyres a lot more than we are.”
Leclerc continued to pile the pressure on Norris, owing to the fact that the Ferrari driver knew conserving his pace and then attacking at the end would lose him too much time on the hard tyres. Though he was close to breaking Norris’ DRS range, Leclerc ultimately made a mistake entering the Variante Alta chicane which undid all of the good work.
Norris could breath a sign of relief, but another opportunity was slowly unfolding. Red Bull had not looked comfortable all weekend and Verstappen knew they headed into the race with a less-than-ideal amount of information on their long runs.
They attempted to complete another race sim during FP3, after changes were made overnight to their car setup between Friday and Saturday. Much of this was down to the simulator work done by Sebastian Buemi back at their factory in Milton Keynes, which they ended up relying on for the race.
Red Bull knew that Imola would be high on tyre wear and focused much of their setup on increasing the downforce, but that brought with it some unintended consequences. The RB20 was bottoming out through parts of the very bumpy track, haemorrhaging critical points of downforce in the slow speed corners while losing out on the straights with the excess drag.
When they took off much of the downforce to counteract the balance issues they faced, it meant Verstappen had to be very careful to not induce too much stress on the hard tyre as they struggled to get it to a perfect working window.
Norris was facing the same problem, but could manage it a lot better in his McLaren: “As soon as I started to push, I felt like I'd oversteer, I'd understeer, lock tyres. It was just the tyres were not in a good window. As soon as they're not in the right window, you can't push. You don't have the confidence with the car. So I had to just manage things as best I could.”
As he started to take chunks out of Verstappen’s six-second lead with 10 laps to go, you could see from the onboards how much Norris was pushing. The critical point came with six laps left - facing the prospect of getting within Verstappen’s DRS window, the combination of overconfidence and dirty air appeared to affect Norris’ ability to close even further.
This led to a stalemate gap of 1.7 seconds, Norris had overworked the hard tyres and started to rip the rubber surface. He was given a life-line when Verstappen deployed too much of his battery to defend, clipping his speed on the straights.
Norris regained some life back into the tyres - a possibility when you back off for a short while before pushing again - and was close to getting back into Verstappen’s DRS range. With a lap to go, the gap got to within a second.
After being shown the black and white flag for three track limit infringements early on in the race, Verstappen could not take any more liberties in his defence. Every corner had to be inch-perfect otherwise he would risk facing the unforgiving track limits police.
A savvy piece of driving from the three-time world champion through the Variante Alta chicane affected Norris’ momentum on the penultimate lap into the DRS detection point at Rivazza, enabling him to hang on to the win by the small margin. Had the DRS zone been longer and Norris had been more careful on his tyres with six laps to go, Verstappen would have been toast.
“It was just like driving on ice, really snappy and just you can feel when the tyres are not gripping up anymore like Turn 7,” said Verstappen. “I almost ended up in the grandstand at some point. Just very difficult, really weird lines that I had to take.
“Those last 10 laps I was really trying to survive with the tyres and then suddenly Lando really picked up pace. I was not sure if I could keep him behind, but I was just trying to do the best I could, pushing as hard as I could with the grip that I had. Luckily, it was just enough laps.”
After conjuring a pole lap out of nowhere on Saturday, I noted how Verstappen had been meticulous with his driving. The same goes for this race. If anyone asks you why Verstappen keeps winning at the rate that he does, you can point them to this win at Imola.
When you consider Perez finished behind both Mercedes drivers and 55 seconds off the pace, it puts into perspective just how far off Red Bull was in real terms. The difference was made by the Dutchman, hours after he did exactly the same in the virtual world. Can anyone stop him?
Ferrari disappoint with ‘overhyped’ upgrades
The Tifosi was out in force to support Ferrari in what has arguably been its most competitive start to a season since 2022, but the team has not been able to challenge Red Bull on race pace at the last two events.
It came into the weekend with a massive update package, which was highlighted by seven key areas on the FIA document published on Friday including a bespoke rear wing for this years car, having ran with the 2023 configuration since the Saudi Arabian GP.
Senior performance engineer, Jock Clear, caveated it by suggesting they needed time to understand the effects before exploiting the best out of the car. Sainz was a bit more blunt in his assessment, suggesting that Imola was always going to be difficult for Ferrari.
“The media overhyped the upgrade package we were bringing. It looks like a new car, but in the numbers it was not a huge package,” Sainz told Sky Sports. “There are very small details everywhere that we were expecting to help, but when I look at the track I knew it would be a McLaren and Red Bull track. Ferrari seem in the past to struggle here and it’s the case.”
It’s telling that Leclerc’s third place was the first podium for Ferrari at Imola since Michael Schumacher in 2006. He was confident about their race pace on Saturday, but their lack of straight line speed during the race proved to be a deciding factor in their pace on Sunday.
Leclerc thinks this is down to a the battery deployment settings compared to the Red Bull and Mercedes power units: “The good thing is that everything we expected from those upgrades, we had it. In terms of data, it did exactly what it was supposed to do, which is always a good thing. Looking back at yesterday, re-analysing qualifying, I think we basically lost everything at the launch.
“For some reason, we had a slightly different power strategy compared to McLaren and Red Bull, and we lost everything on the run down to Turn 2. Max, on top of that, had the slipstream. This is something we'll have to look into. On a track like this, track position is absolutely everything. When you only have a tenth in between Red Bull, McLaren, and ourselves, we need to do everything perfect. The third place [start] today cost us, maybe, a better result in the race.”
If Ferrari can unlock the potential from these updates, it’s highly likely they will look more like the second best car in the coming races. Monaco is historically Leclerc’s ‘bogey circuit’ having failed to finish on his first three attempts and suffered miserable outcomes at the last two runnings.
On top of that, he does not expect their updates to take full effect at such a unique track: “True that it hasn't been the most successful race for me until now. However, the pace was always there and that gives me the confidence that it will be the case this year too. Monaco is so specific that we need to start a little bit from a blank page. Free practice is super, super important to build the pace little by little. But I'm confident we'll be strong.”
Mercedes in 'no mans land’
The team that looked most out of shape of the regular front runners was Mercedes. George Russell was the only driver in the top ten to run a three-stop strategy, after being brought in six laps earlier than Lewis Hamilton at the end of the first stint. He was told to pit again due to the high tyre wear and threat of being overtaken by Hamilton and Perez.
Russell said he wasn’t going to “sulk over losing a P6” but acknowledged that Mercedes is trailing further behind its rivals than anticipated when speaking to Sky Sports: “This is where we are right now. A little bit in no man's land behind the Ferraris and McLarens but ahead of the midfield.
“Everyone is still super motivated, the morale isn't dropping at all, which is quite inspiring to say. Everyone is trying to make this work and improve it. In Brackley and Brixworth, [they] are working full gas right now, which is great to see. We have got to keep on pushing.”
Mercedes also brought a significant upgrade package to this race on top of the updates they brought to Miami, but team principal Toto Wolff expects it will be marginal gains they make rather than anything significant in their fight back to the top.
"We are 30-plus seconds off the quickest guys and that's a lot P6 and P7 us nothing to be proud of,” said Wolff. “You can hear the frustration in my voice but there is more to come and it's incremental, marginal gains we need to make. This is how the sport goes.”
There was some comeuppance in the fact that Perez was also lost in Red Bull’s tricky weekend, but Mercedes are falling behind significantly in this battle to unseat them at the top. It was confirmed over the weekend that their chief aerodynamicist, Gioacchino Vino, had parted ways after six years in yet another blow to their personnel behind the scenes.
Ferrari’s Simone Resta and Enrico Sampo will join Brackley in October, the former having worked with technical director James Allison at Ferrari between 2013 and 2016. That was a key period in which Allison was credited with turning around Ferrari’s fortunes by starting focus on the following year’s challenger earlier, instead of persevering with a failing car.
Perhaps this is the mindset needed to be adopted for Mercedes if they want to avoid the fate of other great teams after a period of total dominance.