Seven things we learned at the 2024 United States Grand Prix

Box-office? Definitely. This year’s edition of the F1 race at Austin’s Circuit of the Americas threw up a thrilling battle between the two title protagonists over third – one that predictably ended with a stewards’ call that split the audience. Ferrari’s commanding 1-2 was almost secondary to the battle between Max Verstappen and Lando Norris. 

Charles Leclerc was brilliantly opportunistic at the start, waiting for the Verstappen-Norris fight at the front to boil over beyond the white lines for him to ghost into the lead and leave the two in his wake. But Ferrari had known after the sprint race that a win was on the cards, even from the second row of the grid. 

PLUS: How Leclerc won another ‘Austria situation’ over Red Bull in Austin

There were fights throughout the field over contested championship positions, over track limits penalties, and over an unexpected rivalry between a man in his 40s and a man who wasn’t even born when the aforementioned veteran made his F1 debut. 

Here’s everything we learned in the Lone Star state. 

1. Ferrari’s recent upgrades pass the litmus test 

“I think this will be the most important test so far for us, to see whether all these upgrades that we brought in the past are working in the right direction for more of a normal kind of track”.

This was Carlos Sainz’s tentative assessment of Ferrari’s hopes on Thursday, as a recent run of good form at Monza, Baku, and Singapore all came at less conventional circuits.  

Had the team eradicated the performance loss it sustained in high-speed corners through bouncing? Ferrari’s 1-2 punch in Austin suggested that it had at least alleviated those symptoms – at least, to a certain degree. 

In qualifying, the SF-24 seemed to struggle with the bumps in the opening sector and thus the drivers couldn’t attack the esses with the same gusto as Verstappen or Norris, but the car was dynamite in race trim.  

Remember back in 2022 when Ferrari had a habit of chewing through its Pirellis? That’s a long-faded memory now; the red cars now have a delicate touch with tyres and this has opened considerable latitude with strategy. Sainz could be pulled in for his stop knowing that an undercut could work long-term, and Leclerc could go deeper into the race on the mediums to ensure he had a tyre delta for his second and final stint.  

The constructors’…