ROUND 21: 🇧🇷 Brazil
FORMULA 1 LENOVO GRANDE PRÊMIO DE SÃO PAULO 2024
Circuit stats
- Circuit name: Autódromo José Carlos Pace
- First Grand Prix: 1973
- Number of laps: 71
- Circuit Length: 4.309 km
- Race Distance: 305.879 km
- Lap record: 1:10.540 Valtteri Bottas (2018)
- 2023 winner: Max Verstappen
Track Map
Its getting all a bit ridiculous this F1 circus.
The complaining, the whining, the bitching on the radio, the red flags and lack of sportsmanship.
Are local kart tracks and speedway all like this now or its all drama there too?
WEC doesn’t have this circus feeling to me.
Max got his pit stop in under a red flag, and that made all the difference.
While I’m a Verstappen fan I really want this to stop. It’s not exciting and as an additional thing it might lead teamsvto leave their drivers out in dangerous conditions hoping to gain track position in case of a red flag.
17 fastest laps and finishing 19 seconds ahead of Ocon begs to differ. Max would’ve won even if he had pitted under the safety car and he would’ve beaten Norris even without a safety car. Nobody had the pace Max had. The red flag made his race easier but it didn’t “make all the difference”.
Sheesh. You get open track position in such conditions you can rattle off fast laps. Nobody said he wasn’t a great driver. It just fell his way. Thin skin much?
Did you watch the same race as the rest of us? He didn’t just cruise into first position, he passed half the grid before the red flag.
And pretty ironic calling others thin skinned when you’re the one who can’t accept that Max was phenomenal this race. Every comment trying to downplay his racing.
You can’t ignore that Max was given a free pitstop. Would Max have won even if he hadn’t? Maybe. But after he was given the free pitstop, it was a sure thing that he was going to be in the top 3 ahead of George and Lando.
I agree that the red flag made it easy for him to win, but not because of the free pitstop, it’s because Merc and McLaren made the wrong strategy call.
Everybody knows that if the race conditions require wets there’s a high chance the race is called off. Both Merc and McLaren pitted before the worst rain which means they weren’t waiting to see if the race is called off. Had the race been called off I don’t think people would be looking at Max. I think people would be questioning why Merc and McLaren decided to pit early. The red flag was beneficial to Max because Merc and McLaren made the wrong call by pitting early.
VERSTAPPEN’S 2024 CHAMPIONSHIP
If he finishes ahead of Norris in Las Vegas, he will win the championship
Norris needs to outscore Verstappen by 3 points to avoid it.
Lando bitching about his luck so much when he had half the race to make progress. Instead he just went backwards.
Yeah and in post race interview he said Red Bull’s strategy “was not talent just luck”. Come on dude why so salty.
It is though? I am in no way disregarding Max’s drive, he was brilliant today, but the interview question was specifically about the VSC and red flag, which is 100% luck. Red Bull and Alpine got a free tyre change while every other team lost time and positions for the pit stop.
Plenty of stuff the FIA should fix after this race. They should change the rules to not allow modifications to the car during a red flag in the future for a start.
Edit: You can hear what the interviewer asked here. I don’t think he’s commenting on Max’s drive, just pit strategy. He also did acknowledge the mistakes he made during the race, so there’s that.
The VSC was luck. Pitting neither under the VSC nor under the safety car was a strategic call. Red bull and Alpine both made an educated guess based on the amount rain that there is a high possibility for a red flag. It was lucky but there was plenty of strategy involved. Also all three of them drove brilliantly to put themselves in a position to capitalise. Remember Colapinto binned it on fresh inters while max, ocon and gasly kept it on the track on won’t worn inters. Saying it was 100% luck is doing a disservice to all 3 of them and their teams
He lost the lead again and went off a few times and the team topped it off with bad strategy calls (+Lando wanted to come in even earlier) has nothing to do with luck i think.
+Lando wanted to come in even earlier
Exactly. He was asking to be pit even before the VSC and is now bitching that the team pit him
Absolute masterclass from Max. Was just leagues above everyone else.
He also had to remain accident free while overtaking quite a few cars, in a race where there were crashes left right and centre. Sure he got lucky but he also made his own luck by driving an incident free race.
Say what you want about the guy, his attitude, or on track antics oft times, you cannot take today’s drive away from him. I’m not a fan of any of the former, but I concede, begrudgingly, today’s drive proved him to be one of the greats. The belligerent fastest laps at the end of it all were such a statement too. I can’t; I just can’t 😅
