There would be no Ferrari fairytale at Monza this year, but the race wasn’t much poorer for it.
We got a great last-gasp duel between Sergio Pérez and Carlos Sainz for second place, after which the Ferrari drivers engaged in a private edge-of-your-set battle for a final spot on the podium.
Lewis Hamilton deployed the contrastrategy to superb effect to make up much ground late to finish a reasonable sixth.
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Alex Albon put in a sterling defensive drive to hold seventh place in his otherwise uncompetitive Williams car.
A great race doesn’t need to have lots of overtaking, only lots of battling, and Monza had that in spades.
But, as always, there’s an asterisk. The race was thrilling if you forget that Max Verstappen waltzed to victory.
For 15 short laps it appeared as though the title leader might actually have been out of answers to break though pole-getter Sainz’s defences. It took only one mistake from the Spaniard for Verstappen to barge through and establish an unassailable lead, grabbing a slice of history with it.
This season will be remembered for Verstappen’s ruthless domination, but races like the Italian Grand Prix remind us that actually the racing has been pretty good all year, so long as you start counting from second place.
VERSTAPPEN MAKES IT 10 OUT OF 10
We’re officially in uncharted territory.
No driver has ever enjoyed as long a dominant streak as Verstappen, whose 10 victories on the bounce take him past Sebastian Vettel’s nine in succession in 2013.
It also usurps Alberto Ascari’s nine in a row, though that record excludes the 1953 Indianapolis 500, which counted in that year’s world championship but was not a grand prix.
Red Bull Racing also becomes the first team to win 15 grands prix consecutively, eclipsing Ferrari’s 14 set in 1952–53 — though, again, this record excludes the Indianapolis 500, and it also predates the constructors championship.
But asterisks like these no longer matter. Verstappen and Red Bull Racing are rewriting the history books in their favour such that their superiority this season — and perhaps this era, for who knows how long this might last — will be totally unimpeachable.
You have to go all the way back to last November’s São Paulo Grand Prix to find a race Red Bull Racing didn’t win. The team has won 24 of the last 25 races and 31 of the last 35.
Verstappen himself has won 12 of 14 races this season is now four wins short of breaking his own record for most wins in a year, set last season. He’s won 21 of the last 25 grands prix.
Together they can target two loftier team goals: the record for most wins by a constructor in a season, set at 19 by Mercedes in 2016, and the holy grail of an unprecedented clean sweep.
It looks like an increasingly brave thing to bet against it.
Verstappen remains on track to wrap up the championship by early October.
He has to outscore Pérez by 35 points between now and the end of the Japanese Grand Prix to equal Michael Schumacher’s record of six races remaining once the championship is won.
That would require Pérez to finish seventh and eighth in Singapore and Suzuka, meaning the following round in Qatar remains the most likely site of Verstappen’s third championship coronation.
FERRARI’S VITAL REMINDER IN SEASON OF WOE
It’s not the result Ferrari wanted, but it might be the result the team needed.
Few gave Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc much hope of winning the Italian Grand Prix. While there was merit to its gamble on straight-line speed to take pole position, the car’s inherent weakness in tyre life was always going to leave them vulnerable, particularly to a driver as determined as Verstappen.
But rather than think about how Ferrari did finish third and fourth, it might be better to think about what the team didn’t do.
The drivers didn’t botch their launches and their first laps. It meant for a brief 15 or so laps the tifosi dared to dream that victory could be on the cards.
Carlos Sainz didn’t fumble his defence. His car positioning was constantly centimetre perfect in a way that reminded the sport that in a more consistently competitive Ferrari he could be a force to be reckoned with.
The pit wall didn’t embarrass itself on strategy, judging well its transition to the hard tyre despite knowing that it had dire tyre life.
And the two cars managed to avoid a hugely damaging incident of friendly fire while sparring for the podium during the final laps of the race, not only a boon for fans watching but also a great show of faith in the drivers to race responsibly by team management.
In 2023, when Red Bull Racing is clearly in a league of its own, third and fourth is the most any other team can realistically hope for, and Ferrari comfortably locked out both places.
Not every race is going to be as smooth for the Scuderia. Its car is clearly extremely adaptable to this sort of high-speed, low-downforce circuit, and there are precious few of them remaining this year. But nor will many of them be as bad as Zandvoort either.
Having already had resources switched to an all-new 2024 car for several months, all Ferrari can do this year is execute strongly — prove that with a better car the team can be a force again and end 2023 with some hope. Prove that the pieces are being put in place in the right order.
That’s what a race like this will have done for the Italian home crowd — and for Formula 1, which would surely love to see motorsport’s most famous team fighting back at the front.
GOOD RESULT GOES BEGGING ON TOUGH DAY FOR PIASTRI
Oscar Piastri turned what had begun as a scrappy weekend during practice into a polished performance by qualifying and the race, starting seventh and holding that position off the line ahead of teammate Lando Norris.
Reasonable points should have been on the cards from there, but twice he was punted down the order by events out of his control.
The first was signalled by Norris, who radioed early in the race that he was the faster driver and asked for Piastri to pick up the pace — driver code for requesting a team order.
The team didn’t appear to follow up on the request. The nature of Monza and the slipstream is that a following car will always look faster regardless of whether it actually is.
But the Norris effectively got his way via an undercutting pit stop, ostensibly to cover an earlier stop from Fernando Alonso behind him. Alonso had been around three seconds back when he made his tyre change; Norris stopped one lap later and added another second to that margin.
Norris’s gain was cold comfort to Piastri, however, whose advantage had been too small to defend the undercut. He came in on the following tour and lost position.
It’s the second time the same strategy approach has cost Piastri position to his teammate in the last four rounds.
He reportedly called the team out about it over radio. It’s unclear whether that was front of mind when he and Norris briefly clashed in the first corner as he exited the pits and realised what his strategy had done to his race.
The Aussie’s afternoon went from bad to substantially worse later in the race, however, when Lewis Hamilton attempted to crowd him to the edge of the track entering the Roggia chicane. They made contact, and while Hamilton continued, Piastri was forced to pit for a new front wing, dropping him out of the points and ruining his afternoon.
Hamilton copped a five-second penalty for the crash, which he owned after the race. It had no effect on his outcome.
“My fault,” he said. “Honestly, it was my blind spot. I didn’t realise I hadn’t left enough space, so I apologised to him.”
A battle with Liam Lawson in the lower reaches of the order then earnt Piastri a five-second penalty of his own for passing off track, and what turned out to be a miserable afternoon ended with 12th place.
“Not a lot went our way,” Piastri lamented. “Disappointing to come out of that with no points.”
Every driver has to suffer weekends like these, but the Aussie can take heart from the fact he was arguably the quicker McLaren driver this weekend at a circuit the team had low expectations for.
But it ends what had been a strong European leg of the season on a sour note ahead of a more challenging run of tracks he won’t have raced on before.
A TALE OF TWO ROOKIES
Seventh place and six points was worthy reward for Alex Albon, who put in a typically superb defensive drive in his slippery Williams at a track the team has long earmarked as a productive one for its car.
Teammate Logan Sargeant, the only full-time rookie on the grid, finished 13th and was never really in contention for points.
Having not been able to crack Q3 — or, more to the point, ending Q2 slowest — was already a bad start, and while he was always going to find progress difficult, he never made much of an impression either.
It’s not that it was a particularly bad race. It’s just that the clock continues to tick down without the sort of convincing result that’ll seal a new deal for him at Williams. While the team has been supportive, its language has also made clear that it’s in the American’s hands to mount a case.
His argument could only have been weakened by an excellent first full weekend from Liam Lawson.
Daniel Ricciardo’s injury stand-in didn’t put a foot wrong in Monza.
Not only did the New Zealander qualify less than 0.2 seconds behind teammate Yuki Tsunoda — and he thought he had the pace in him to crack Q3 with another lap — but he also finished less than seven seconds short of his first point in 11th place, which is the best result delivered by the second AlphaTauri car.
You couldn’t find two more contrasting stories. In the space of a week Lawson has done wonders for his reputation, and it feels as though there’s a mood now for a seat to be found for him. He’ll likely get two more chances to burnish that reputation further too.
Sargeant, on the other hand, is struggling to grasp his F1 opportunity. And time’s running out.
