Max Verstappen gave Lewis Hamilton a good shake in Austin, where the Dutchman put on a tremendous display of all his qualities and left the Brit speechless. Many of those skills, such as speed and aggressiveness, he had already put in the eyes of the world in his seven years in Formula One. Others, such as a sense of strategy and patience, have developed lately and are beginning to master them. This triumph is the eighth in the results account of this season for the boy from Hasselt, who, at 24 years old, takes some air as leader of the general table, in which he already has a 12-point margin over the current champion , Hamilton, finally second. Checo Pérez finished third and certified the 200th podium for Red Bull, while Carlos Sainz finished seventh and Fernando Alonso quit by breaking the rear wing of his Alpine in the final laps.
When two rival cars display as similar potential as this season’s Mercedes and Red Bull, the races turn into a kind of chess game, in which now one moves and then the other, and the winner ends up with Be the one who makes the right decisions at the best times. In Austin, it was Verstappen who uncorked the champagne from the highest step of the podium, as much as it could perfectly have been Hamilton, finally second, who came out the winner of the United States Grand Prix, the most festive of the calendar if one looks at the aspect of the tribunes, completely packed with fans, most of them without masks, in Texas, the most skeptical state of all with the damaging power of the covid.
The previous one predicted a brawl of the times between the two runners who are playing the title, and the truth is that they barely coincided in two specific moments: in the first corner and in the last lap, at which point Hamilton hunted his opponent, but without time or tires to get past him in those last curves and straights.
The pole Mad Max and the slump that caught the Briton on Saturday gave the young Red Bull the role of main favorite for this appointment of an exciting World Cup, much more alive than in recent campaigns. However, that condition of privilege was passed on to each other. Hamilton started like a shot – his reaction speed when the lights went out was three hundredths faster than his opponent’s – and that put him at the front of the pack, so that Verstappen later scrambled by throwing two undercut. This maneuver allows the pursuer to overtake the car immediately ahead when anticipating the stop.
The rubber strategy
As soon as he leaves the workshop, the pilot who carries it out takes advantage of his completely new tires, while the rider who suffers it sees his times fall apart due to the whiplash accumulated by his own. This effect is particularly relevant on tracks like Austin’s, where the asphalt is brutally abrasive, thus penalizing even more the rider who stays on the track with the older compounds.
Positioned behind the red buffalo car, Mercedes and her spearhead had no choice but to play against. Hamilton delayed his two visits to the garages in the hope of risking victory in the end, with the wheels much more solid. Everything seemed on track for the star brand and its flagship, which faced the last stage of the race with eight laps less on the tires of its prototype.
The 8.7 seconds behind Hamilton with respect to Verstappen with 18 laps to go were falling like ripe fruit until the difference was stuck in less than one (lap 54 of 56). However, the cornerstone of Red Bull is already starting to be an old cat, to the point of being able to run with a calculator on his head, preserving some rubber for the end, a last shot of the kidney that led him to sign a of his best works, both for speed and control of the scene. Hamilton tightened all the nuts in those final meters, but Verstappen resisted and advances in the leadership of the World Cup.
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