Verstappen coasts to win the Italian GP behind a safety car

The 2022 Italian GP went piece by piece, as the battle for the lead wasn’t over until the penultimate lap. Charles Leclerc started the race on pole position, but P2 starter George Russel gave him a run for his money in Turn 1. Leclerc rose to the challenge and went comfortably into the lead. Max Verstappen meanwhile started the race in P7, and quickly caught up to reach P2 in the early laps.

Leclerc led the first stages of the Grand Prix.

Anticipating Verstappen’s strong pace, Ferrari decided to adopt a two-stop strategy, pitting Leclerc to switch from Softs to Medium tires on lap 12 itself. Verstappen and Russel, meanwhile, used their first tires for a long time and went deep into the race. Later, Leclerc took the race lead on the soft tires with less than 20 laps to go and came out around 20 seconds behind Verstappen. The hunt was on.

Ferrari opted to follow a two-stop strategy, pitting Leclerc for a series of softs with less than 20 laps to go.

However, Leclerc’s pace on the soft tires was disappointing, and he was able to close the gap from 20 seconds to just 16 seconds, before his tire advantage was neutralized. But to give the race a boost, Daniel Ricciardo’s car came to a stop in the middle of the two Lesmos following a suspected engine failure, triggering a safety car. This meant the field would be regrouped and several riders would stop for fresh soft tires anticipating a chaotic restart.

Daniel Ricciardo had a mechanical breakdown and had to abandon the race.

But to everyone’s disappointment, the reboot never happened. Ricciardo’s car was presumably not in neutral and needed a tractor to retrieve it off the track, extending the safety car period. Interestingly though, race control chose not to flag the session despite the tractor being on the track, which is standard protocol, and the race ended behind the safety car, with Verstappen bringing Leclerc back. and Russell at home. “We had a good race. We had a really good race car and we were controlling the gap and then the safety car came out. Unfortunately we didn’t have a restart,” said Max Verstappen after the race.

Nyck de Vries impressed on his F1 debut scoring P9 for Williams.

They were followed by their teammates Sainz, Hamilton and Perez, who finished the race in P4-P6 respectively. After a poor start to the race which saw him lose many places, Norris finished seventh ahead of Gasly. Replacing Alex Albon, Nyck de Vries brought home an impressive P9 for Williams on his Formula 1 debut, and the former Formula E champion also received the driver of the day, having shown a exceptional pace and racing spirit despite only driving the Williams car for 30 minutes in FP3 before qualifying. Zhou finished the top 10 with yet another points finish.

2022 Formula 1 Round 16 Italian Grand Prix: Race Results

2022 Formula 1 Drivers’ World Championship Standings After Round 16 – Italian GP

2022 Formula 1 Constructors’ World Championship standings after round 16 – Italian GP