Max Verstappen (Red Bull) will try to continue putting pressure on the McLarens of Australian Oscar Piastri – championship leader – and Englishman Lando Norris – second – this weekend at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, home of the Mexico City Grand Prix, the twentieth of the Formula One World Championship. A test in which the Dutch quadruple world champion has the record of victories: five, in total.
Verstappen, 28, has made the World Cup red hot by showing off again last weekend at the United States Grand Prix in Austin; where, after winning the sprint – which neither of the two McLarens finished, retired after colliding in the first corner -, he won a race that he dominated from start to finish. In which Norris was second and Piastri, fifth.
Right now, with five Grand Prix and two short tests to go (those in Brazil and Qatar), Piastri leads with 346 points, twelve more than Norris and 40 more than Verstappen; that asks for cards in the fight for a title that at the end of August – when the sporting idol of the Netherlands was also third overall, but 104 units behind – seemed to be an exclusive matter for the McLarens; team that in Singapore mathematically revalidated the title of builders.
However, after winning three of the last four races (not counting the Texas sprint), in Monza (Italy), Baku (Azerbaijan) and Austin; and having been second on the night in Singapore – where the Englishman George Russell (Mercedes) won, fourth in the contest, at 94 – ‘Mad Max’ has added maximum tension on a psychological level. After passing the steamroller at the Circuit of the Americas. Where he raised his own third historical record of victories in F1 to 68 by achieving his fifth of the year.
All this, before arriving in Mexico, home of the event in which he holds the record of victories and the one in which he has won the most times. The Dutch sports super-predator also climbed to the top of the podium five times on the circuit owned by his team, the Red Bull Ring; but one of his victories in Austria was obtained in the Styrian Grand Prix with which Spielberg ‘doubled’ to configure the complicated calendar – marked by the consequences of the pandemic – of 2021: the same year in which the Mexican event changed its name; using your capital.
Verstappen and the McLarens will monopolize the spotlight, but the last winner in the Mexican capital, for now, is the Spanish Carlos Sainz (Williams), who last year achieved the fourth of his four F1 victories at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez. With Ferrari and one day after having signed his sixth pole position, the last to date in the premier category.
Sainz, third in the sprint, did not finish the long race in Austin, as he abandoned on the seventh lap after touching the Mercedes of young rookie Andrea Kimi Antonelli, in an action for which the stewards sanctioned him with the loss of five places on the grid next Sunday. In a Grand Prix in which the usual format is recovered, with three free practice sessions.
The man from Madrid will not ride in the first of the tests that will take place on the Mexican track, 4,304 meters long – the third shortest in the World Championship, behind Monaco and Zandvoort (Holland) -, with 17 curves (seven on the left) and a straight line of more than a kilometer, in which speeds of over 340 kilometers per hour can be exceeded. It will be the British tester Luke Browning, F2 driver, who will get into Sainz’s Williams in the first training session this Friday; in which up to a total of nine reserve pilots will take part.
His compatriot, the Asturian double world champion Fernando Alonso (Aston Martin), tenth in the United States, will also seek better luck in Mexico, a Grand Prix in which he has never been particularly good and in which he has only scored twice in his eight appearances, with a ninth as his best result.
In Mexico, Argentine Franco Colapinto (Alpine) will compete (in search of his first points of the year and after finishing seventeenth in Austin) in the fourteenth Grand Prix since his return to F1. On the highest circuit of the entire championship, 2,285 meters above sea level; in which, due to the low density of the air, everyone will use configurations with high downforce in their cars.
As in the United States – the first part of this ‘double program’ that is completed in the Mexican capital – Pirelli, the sole supplier of tires, skips a compound to expand the number of possible strategies. Again between hard and medium-soft, although this time the range chosen is the softest; and at the Autódromo Hermano the C2 (hard, recognizable by the white stripe), the C4 (medium, yellow stripe) and the C5 (soft, red) will be used.
Apart from the increasingly exciting outcome of the drivers’ championship, the fight for second place in the constructors’ championship will resume in Mexico, already decided in favor of McLaren.
Mercedes, second, and Red Bull, fourth, are only separated by ten points; and the latter, with 331, is only three behind Ferrari: the team for which the Monegasque Charles Leclerc and the seven-time English world champion Lewis Hamilton achieved third and fourth place, respectively, last Sunday in Austin.
The race is scheduled for 71 laps, to complete a route of 305 and a half kilometers.
With information from EFE.
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