The fastest race of the year my hairy arse. Although no safety car came out in the first lap as I predicted, we saw one deployed in lap 10, two bloody red flags, three standing starts and endless virtual safety cars. This. Track. Is. Shit.
Lets start off!! Hamilton wins the first Saudi GP and earns the fastest lap point bringing him tied in points with Max. Max landed in P2 and Bottas stole P3 by a tenth of a second just a few meters before the checkered flag.
The first three leaders of the pack took off very well and kept their positions in the first quarter of the gp. Ricciardo stole two places off the race start and immediately started putting pressure on Gasly.
Both Mercedes were flying today and Bottas did a remarkable job keeping Verstappen at bay until Schumacher lost control in lap 10 in turn 22 and ended int he barrier. Both Mercedes pitted during the yellow flags losing their position to Verstappen. In a surprising turn of events, the race was suspended giving Verstappen a free pitstop costing the Mercedes’ valuable places. But wait thats not all. Just after our second restart which saw Hamilton flying away and Verstappen taking back first position off track, we had our second red flag.
Leclerc clipped Perez who ended up in the wall. Due to the nature of the track Mazepin could not see the commotion and ended up crashing into Russel. This took both Haas cars out of the Saudi GP.
During the second red flag race director Michael Massi gave Redbull the chance to give Hamilton his place before involving the stewards, placing Ocon in p1 followed by Hamilton and Verstappen.
Hamilton overtook Vestappen in the final quarter of the race only to be pushed out. He was instructed to give the position to Lewis but instead of giving way he slowed down abruptly in the middle of the circuit which resulted in Hamilton clipping The Redbull damaging the Mercedes. The pushing off earned Max a 5 second penalty.
This race was an utter mess in terms of direction and was definitely a sham.