By the time Red Bull had an inkling how much pressure Max Verstappen was going to be under at the end of the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix, it was too late to do anything about it.
Lando Norris cut Verstappen’s lead from a peak of seven-and-a-half seconds to just seven-tenths of a second as they took the chequered flag.
The McLaren driver was consistently quicker than Verstappen at the end of the race on the hard tyre compound. His cautious start to that stint appeared to be part of the reason why.
Red Bull might have expected Verstappen to face a tricky end to the race as his team mate Sergio Perez started on the hard rubber and his lap times dropped off 23 laps into his 37-lap stint.
After the race Perez suspected he damaged his car when he went off the track at the Rivazzas. However his lap times largely recovered after that mistake on lap 17, which cost him five seconds. It wasn’t until later that his pace dropped.
Verstappen’s lap times didn’t deteriorate as sharply as his team mate’s, but from around 20 laps into his stint they rose slightly, and he had little answer as Norris began to press.
Norris played his tyres in more gently at the start of his stint compared to his team mate Oscar Piastri, and that appeared to pay off later on. Having given away half a second per lap at times at the start of the stint, Norris gained almost a second a lap compared to Piastri in the latter laps as Verstappen’s car grew bigger ahead of him. Norris’ reduced pace even allowed Charles Leclerc to briefly gain on him.
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As the race entered its final half-dozen laps, both Verstappen and Norris’ lap times were rising as they exhausted their batteries, wrung the last from their tyres and began making occasional errors. Norris’ difficulties were amplified by the aerodynamic wake from Verstappen’s car ahead, and on laps 58 and 59 his progress stalled.
Had it not been for that, Norris might have arrived within DRS range of Verstappen earlier than he ultimately did, on the race’s final lap, by which time it was too late.
In F1’s first fully-dry race at Imola since 2020, one-stop strategies were as usual the preferred route. Among the points-scorers only George Russell came in twice, and his second visit was for fresh tyres in order to bag the fastest lap bonus point. Unusually, he sacrificed a place in order to do so, though it was collected by his team mate, so the…
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