A bright, sunny weekend in Monza brought out the Tifosi in full force. The fan support seemed to buoy Ferrari, who avoided making most of their typical mistakes. They ended up starting P1 and P3, and put on a great show for their fans, even though they didn’t win.
Max got his 10 wins in a row, creating a new record, but Carlos kept him behind for 14 laps—the longest any non-Red Bull has led a race this season. The Ferraris pulled out P3 and P4, and Mercedes seemed to enjoy Monza, finishing high up in the top 10.
Even though their drivers didn’t win, the Tifosi showed their Ferrari and Italian pride. It was partially thanks to them at Monza was one of the best races this season.
Ten in a row for Max Verstappen
This weekend, despite starting P2, Max got his 10th win, making a new record. It’s a new level of dominance in F1 for all other teams to aim for. It’s a miracle reliability or a team error didn’t ruin it for him.
Mechanical issues almost did ruin his 10th win. He started losing 2s a lap towards the end of the race. Red Bull reported they were asking him to manage a heating issue and that something unspecified was wrong with his power unit.
If you ask Max, he wasn’t nervous and wasn’t even thinking about the record. However, if you ask other Red Bull staff, it’s a different story! Helmut Marko said Max was nervous before the race, but Horner called it ‘razor focused.’
However Max was feeling, he broke a record and beat the Monza curse at the same time.
Are 5s penalties enough?
Mercedes did well this weekend, with the car enjoying the Monza circuit. However, they didn’t escape scot-free. Both got 5s time penalties, and Lewis got two penalty points added to his super license thanks to some aggressive defensive driving.
George Russell received his penalty for leaving the track and gaining an advantage when fighting with Esteban Ocon. Lewis Hamilton got his for causing a collision with Oscar Piastri.
However, these penalties… didn’t affect their race in any way. Russell and Hamilton both pulled 5s gaps to the cars behind them, meaning that when they finished, their places weren’t affected at all.
This comes with many questions for me. Is that fair? Like, does that serve the purpose of a penalty when it doesn’t affect the penalized person’s race at all? I don’t have an answer, but I’ll be thinking about it.
Oscar Piastri’s disappointing race.
Poor Oscar was hit with issue after issue in the race this weekend. After qualifying, it looked good, with him outqualifying his teammate Lando Norris and ending up in P7—an excellent qualifying position for the Mclarens, who didn’t expect to be good this weekend.
In the race, however, everything fell apart. It started with a notorious Monza Lando radio message—telling his team he’s faster than his teammate. The team told Lando to wait it out, and their plan became apparent when they pitted Lando before Oscar even though, technically, Oscar would have gotten priority because he was ahead.
This, of course, led to Oscar being undercut by his teammate. A little insulting, but not as insulting as, after Oscar was finally pit and came out on cold tires next to Lando, he and Lando bumped each other going into the first chicane. Painful.
But it wasn’t over for Oscar. Now running behind his teammate, he came upon Lewis Hamilton on an alternate strategy at the end of the race. Hamilton caused a collision and sent Oscar to the back. Oscar managed to claw his way into P12, but it was a painful, grueling race for the rookie.
Has Toto Wolff reached maximum copium?
The Toto Wolff drama is so interesting to me. Maybe it’s because it seems so avoidable. Just say “congradulations to them” and then move on! There’s no need to continue talking shit to the media about another team’s accomplishment.
If you’re out of the loop, here’s the quote from Wolff:
“I don’t know whether he cares about the record. It’s not something that would be important for me, any of those numbers. It’s for Wikipedia. Nobody reads that anyway.”
People rightly pointed out that this was the opposite of everything he said when Lewis got his 100 race wins. Still, I’d expect that—team principals are meant to be biased—and more interested in why he has chosen now to make himself (and Lewis, by extension) the focus of the media’s high beam.
Because that wasn’t Toto’s only strange quote from this weekend. He had others, such as this one,
“[Lewis] is the only one I see out there admitting and saying: ‘I got this wrong’… Pretty much everyone is always complaining and moaning, just to try not to get a penalty.”
…okay.
Lewis also got in on the weird quote weekend Mercedes was having, but I’ll ignore that to focus on Toto Wolff. He’s not the only team principal to decry another team’s dominance—Christian Horner was famous for it during the years of Mercedes dominance—but this is such a strange route to take. I wonder what’s happening to make him talk this freely with the media. Maybe he’s just trying to emulate Helmut Marko.
The Sainz family continues to cause drama.
The drama is NOT about their political views, though those are very dramatic. (For those that don’t know, the Sainz openly support the far-right nationalist party in Spain.) This is about the Ferrari drama.
The Sainz family are famously drama merchants and have been ever since their son got into F1 with Toro Rosso. For those who don’t know, the gist is that Carlos Jr. thought he was more worthy of a Toro Rosso seat than Max and said as much to the media. Then, he openly said to the press in 2017 that if Red Bull didn’t pull him up from Toro Rosso, they would be stupid, and he would leave Toro Rosso. Needless to say, that didn’t go over well with Horner and Marko.
However, the biggest throughline between then and now was the rumors spread that Max would be leaving Red Bull—despite his contract for 2018. The source of these rumors turned out to be Carlos Sainz Sr. This puts the rumors of Leclerc to Mercedes that swirled earlier this year in an interesting light. And now Sainz Sr. is openly complaining about Ferrari.
The drama this week, however, is from not all Sainz Sr. but from his wife, Carlos’s mother. She has been active on Twitter, liking tweets that support Carlos at the cost of Charles. Most notably, she liked a tweet saying Charles had no “honor” compared to Carlos.
Strange and funny, but if you want to read into this, why is Carlos’s family doing all this right after Carlos got a podium? Sure, he wasn’t worshiped by the Tifosi like Charles was, but he was still well-loved.
the sprint
Fred Vesti, who led the championship for most of the season but is now chasing Theo Pourchaire for first, won the sprint this weekend! It was a sort of redemption after the wheels-popping-off fiasco last weekend.
Ayuma Iwasa finished on the podium after a run of bad form for the last few races. This brought the Red Bull Junior and Honda Driver’s star back up to the heights it had been after the first few races. Iwasa has a bright future!
the feature
Ollie Bearman, Ferrari’s wunderkind, won at Monza! It was a fantastic, hard-fought win that required an unreal number of safety car restarts. He’s my favorite in F2 right now—every race win feels incredible.
Unfortunately, with the Prema team, only one of them can do well at a time. Ollie won—but Fred Vesti, pursuing the championship, spun out early in the race. It was so unfortunate for the Danish driver. Theo Pourchaire, his championship rival, finished third.
Not all is lost, technically. If Pourchaire doesn’t score points at Abu Dhabi, and Vesti wins and gets fastest lap, he could still take the championship!
Daniel Ricciardo won’t be back by Singapore and maybe not Japan, either. Carlos avoided the gravel the entire race so of course he made up for it in testing. Every team was below the cost cap in 2022. James Vowles is working on big moves at Williams. Sergio Perez is evaluating Red Bull alternatives. Scuderia Ferrari had a known facist come by and take pictures. Aston Martin fell back down at Monza.
The European races are over! Now we head off to Singapore next week. A hardcore track and a night race, I’m so excited to see what happens.