Verstappen Dominates At Imola, Leclerc Sixth After Spin
Calum Gill 16:23 24/04/2022
Max Verstappen’s Formula 1 world championship hopes received a huge boost at Imola as he led team-mate Sergio Pérez in a Red Bull 1-2 while Charles Leclerc was only sixth after a late spin.
Ferrari’s race had immediately gone awry at the damp start of the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, when Leclerc got away slowly from second and fell behind both Pérez and Lando Norris’s McLaren - whose team-mate Daniel Ricciardo tapped the second Ferrari of Carlos Sainz into a spin at Tamburello. Sainz looped into the gravel and was stuck, causing an early safety car and his second consecutive Sunday zero score. It was eight laps before Leclerc managed to take third from Norris, and though he then caught Pérez fairly quickly, the rest of his race would be spent in fruitless attempts to take second from the Red Bull that culminated in a costly error. Leclerc very briefly took second thanks to pitting for dry tyres one lap later than Pérez, but with the Red Bull’s tyres up to temperature it swiftly sliced back ahead into the Villeneuve chicane.
The Ferrari did pressure Pérez for a while, helped by the Red Bull going over the grass at the Variante Alta, before dropping away again. Ferrari tried a second pitstop for soft tyres with 14 laps to go, only for Red Bull to respond and do likewise with both Pérez and Verstappen. Leclerc fell behind Norris again with that stop, swiftly repassed the McLaren and then closed back in on Pérez - only to spin with eight laps to go when he took the Variante Alta kerb too heavily. The championship leader looped over the grass and clattered the barriers, though he got away needing only a new front wing. That pitstop dropped Leclerc down to ninth, from where he made rapid progress to at least salvage sixth.
Behind Verstappen and Pérez, Norris completed a superb weekend with McLaren’s first 2022 podium. George Russell converted a brilliant first lap into a fourth-place finish for Mercedes on a day when his team-mate Lewis Hamilton could not make any progress in the midfield and could only finish a lapped 14th, trapped behind Pierre Gasly’s AlphaTauri despite endless passing attempts. Race control had contentiously not enabled DRS until the second half of the race, but it made no difference to Hamilton when it did. Russell only just held on to fourth at the end from his charging Mercedes predecessor Valtteri Bottas, who had been hampered by a slow Alfa Romeo pitstop earlier on.
Leclerc’s late charge demoted Yuki Tsunoda, Sebastian Vettel and Kevin Magnussen to seventh through ninth places, with Lance Stroll making it a double points finish for Aston Martin in 10th. Tsunoda had held up a long train of cars for much of the race before coming alive late on and surging past Magnussen and Vettel. A relatively early change to slicks added to a great first lap set up Vettel’s strong result, with Magnussen - who had run fifth at first - among those Vettel vaulted with that tyre change. Fernando Alonso was the only other retiree alongside Sainz. The Alpine made contact with Mick Schumacher’s Haas as they dodged the Sainz/Ricciardo tangle, sending Schumacher spinning and causing damage to Alonso’s car that eventually led to a chunk of its sidepod flying off.
