Max Verstappen quite literally cruised to victory at the Australian Grand Prix, but it’s not the cruise he or anyone else would’ve been expecting.
This year’s race lasted more than two and a half hours and featured three red flags and several bizarre crashes. The regulations themselves were tested, and by the times the stewards clocked off for the night — more than five hours after the chequered flag fell — not everyone was satisfied with where the grand prix had ended up.
Verstappen was of course. After having dropped to third on the first lap behind both Mercedes cars, he easily rescued the lead early in the race with an incredible turn of speed in his RB19. After passing the then leading Lewis Hamilton along the back straight, he put a mammoth two seconds between himself and his former title rival in a single sector alone. The Mercedes never really stood a chance.
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But that advantage was reeled in by a late-race red flag that ultimately precipitated a comical series of crashes and the farcical situation of no-one being sure how or in fact whether the race would end when it was suspended with just one lap left to run.
In the end it was decided that the cars would take the flag in a parade-style formation finish with no overtaking.
Verstappen crossed the line first, his rivals unable to deny him his second win of the year.
He wasn’t the only winner of the race though, with McLaren taking its first points of the season after a double score for both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri — a much-needed result after a tough week for the British team.
Race control and the stewards, meanwhile, were at the centre of attention for much of the race, with the final finishing order heavily dependent on some key calls from the FIA.
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On Saturday Ferrari was counting the cost of missed opportunities through operational errors, but on Sunday the team was left ruing driver mistakes that left it pointless and disappointed leaving Melbourne.
The team is now fourth in the constructors standings with 26 points, less than half Mercedes’s total, a little more than a third of Aston Martin’s total and almost the full 100 points off Red Bull Racing.
Things started badly, with Charles Leclerc causing a collision with Lance Stroll on the opening lap that left him beached in the gavel.
Carlos Sainz continued, clinging to the Lewis Hamilton-Fernando Alonso battle for second, but a mistake at the lap-57 restart that spun Alonso backwards earnt him a five-second penalty.
It had the disproportionately dire effect of dropping him out of the points because of the parade finish to the race.
“I think it is the most unfair penalty I’ve seen in my life,” Sainz said. “So before talking to [the media] and saying really bad stuff, bad words, I prefer to go back to the stewards and have a conversation with them.”
Even Alonso, who was later promoted back to third, thought the punishment didn’t fit the crime.
“Probably the penalty is too harsh,” he said. “On lap 1 it is very difficult always to judge the grip level, and I think we don‘t go intentionally into another car, because we know that we risk also our car and our final position.
“It‘s just part of racing. I didn’t see the replay properly, but for me it feels too hard.”
Sainz also had two penalty points added to his licence.
The Spaniard has considerable reason to feel hard done by too given the far more disastrous crash between Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon on the very same lap resulted in no further action — and after benefit of a post-race hearing with both drivers.
Gasly crushed Ocon against the wall in a high-energy smash on the outside of turn 2, but the stewards decided leniency was warranted given it was on the first lap after a standing start — exactly the reasoning Sainz had hoped would exonerate him.
One might suggest it’s merely a coincidence that two points on Gasly’s licence would have resulted in an automatic one-race ban.
Leclerc RETIRED in first lap CHAOS | 01:07
McLAREN FINALLY GETS SOME POINTS ON WACKY DAY
It took a long time — a long, long time — but eventually the Australian Grand Prix ended and not one but both McLaren drivers picked up points for the first time this season.
Lando Norris was on track for a comfortable eighth-place finish before the final set of red flags, having finally broken through Nico Hülkenberg’s defences. That was up from 13th on the grid after a strong opening phase of the race. He was classified sixth.
Home favourite Oscar Piastri was thereabouts too, but with the McLaren car only just on the cusp of being a top-10 machine this weekend, his fractional deficit to Norris meant he seemed set to miss out on scoring.
That is until those final frenetic laps. With both Alpine drivers taking each other out and Sainz copping his post-race time penalty, Piastri was promoted to the points.
It’d be unfair to say it was a fluke, though. Quite aside from the fact that most races are packed with random circumstances, Piastri drove exactly the kind of a race a rookie needed to execute under the pressure of his first home race.
Assured, clean and precise, he did everything he needed to bring the car home in a state capable of taking advantage of whatever came his way.
“I think even before the chaos, for the majority of the race the pace was pretty strong,” he told Sky Sports. “I had a good start, stayed out of trouble, stayed away from damage — half the job just seems to be avoiding people who are out of control and making a lot of mistakes and crashing into people.
“I’d say the first positive race in terms of actual pace, things came a bit more together today.“
There were lessons to learn too, with his too-long assault on Yuki Tsunoda’s position costing him a shot at the points early in the race. His experiments with using the battery and engine modes will serve him well in future battles — particularly given Tsunoda is one of the sport’s fiercest defenders.
McLaren CEO Zak Brown was full of praise.
“It was great for Oscar to get points in his home race. The team did well, stayed out of trouble and sometimes you get luck your way and sometimes you don’t,” he said.
“It’s early days but everything we’re seeing is he’s pretty much going to be a match for Lando — at least that’s our hope. I’m sure Oscar will be saying, ‘Actually, maybe Lando should be a match for me’.
“They’re definitely very close, you can see it on the overlays that there’s not much between the two and I think Oscar just needs a bit more experience to put it together on a lap-by-lap basis in the way Lando can.”
Verstappen, Hamilton react to Aus finish | 00:41
WHEN IS A LAP NOT A LAP?
There was considerable speculation on Sunday night about whether the finishing order of the grand prix had been decided upon fairly, with Haas lodging an appeal against the classification in an attempt to get Hülkenberg further up the order.
Hülkenberg had been as high as fourth on that aborted lap-57 restart, but he was dropped back to eighth, his position on the restart grid, for the parade finish in what the team thought was a misapplication of the rules.
You can read here a blow-by-blow explanation of how the chaotic end of the race came about.
The regulation that governs the order of the drivers at a restart leaves considerable wriggle room in which race control can manoeuvre.
Article 57.3 of the sporting regulations states: “In all cases the order will be taken at the last point at which it was possible to determine the position of all cars. All such cars will then be permitted to resume the sprint session or the race.”
Race control picked the end of lap 56, when the cars were heading out from pit lane for that botched restart, for the finishing order.
But Haas contended there was a more recent point at which the order could be measured — when all the cars crossed what’s called the second safety car line, which is where the pit lane joins the track.
The second safety line is one of several official FIA timing points around the track.
But the race director contended that he didn’t have time to analyse whether the second safety car line would be a fair indicator of car position. It’s been suggested that’s because several cars, particularly Sergio Perez, went speeding over the run-off instead of making the corner, which distorted the positions. Several other drivers were also clearly barely in control of their cars as they headed towards the first turn.
Given the regulations empower the race director to decide one way or another, Haas’s appeal was thrown out — but not before more than five hours of excruciating deliberation.
And while the FIA’s reason not to go with Haas’s logic has its merits, it doesn’t answer the broader question of whether these super-late red-flag restarts are worth the risk of these farcical endings in exchange for one or two laps of racing.
SEVEN SENT SPINNING FROM RESTART | 01:16
DO RED FLAG TYRE CHANGE RULES NEED A RETHINK?
The race had barely got started before it was called off by the first red flag, with Alex Albon’s massive Turn 6 forcing race control to suspend the grand prix.
It’s rare for scattered debris and stones to be enough to throw the red flag, with a safety car ordinarily sufficing, but the FIA evidently thought the clean-up would be lengthy enough that pausing proceedings was the better option.
While safety is always the priority, the call had the negative side-effect of killing the race.
George Russell had just stopped for tyres behind the safety car when the red flag was waved, dropping him to seventh. Sainz had done the same, leaving him 10th.
But with all drivers called back to the pit lane, team were free to make their sole tyre change during the suspension. Almost all of them switched to the durable hard tyre that would seem them through the final 50 laps.
With no drivers needing to make another stop, the strategy battle was neutralised, and Verstappen ultimately cruised to an easy win.
There’s an argument to be made that red flags, much like safety cars, are a simple matter of luck when it comes to how they influence a race. Red flags in particular are rare enough not to rate a mention when it comes to rule rewrites.
Russell ‘screwed’ in unlucky early pit! | 01:04
But given F1 mandates at least one pit stop per race specifically to create some strategic variation — that comes via the rule requiring each driver to use at least two tyre compounds — there’s an argument to be made that tyre changes during red flags should be regulated.
Preventing teams from changing tyres at all opens the sport to safety risks if, for example, a red flag comes very late in a long stint when rubber is almost fully worn — as was the case for the second red flag. The drivers could barely keep it on the road with soft tyres; imagine if they were all on badly worn hards.
Instead it would be better to say that drivers still have to use two different tyre compounds during a race but that a change made during a red flag doesn’t count towards that tally.
If that had been the case on Sunday afternoon, we might’ve seen some more varied tactics in Melbourne — albeit no strategy gamble would’ve been enough to overcome Verstappen’s mighty pace advantage.
