Saturday, November 2, 2024, 16:45
| Updated 9:44 p.m.
The weekend in Brazil has never been one of the most predictable of the season, far from it, but at least this Saturday it has not been left without anything to tell thanks to the sprint format. And the highlight of this Saturday, the classification, could not be disputed.
The FIA was at the mercy of the atmospheric conditions once again. The rain that began to fall between the sprint race and the scheduled time for the session in which the pole position for Sunday was to be determined became an organizational enemy for the drivers, engineers and the promoters themselves. It is not the first time that something like this has happened, but this time the urgent need for the FIA to rethink the situation every time it rains hard enough to make it dangerous to contest an official session was portrayed. What are extreme rain tires for? Why aren’t heaters placed, again, at least when these conditions exist? These two questions were said, laughing, by Lewis Hamilton to Stefano Domenicali, head of Formula 1. Between joke and joke, the truth emerges.
This was the culmination of two absurd hours of waiting and continuous delays of 15 minutes, first, then half an hour and at the end more than 45 minutes before a definitive cancellation. Qualifying will be held this Sunday, a few hours before the race… as long as time permits. And the forecasts point to a 60% greater chance of rain than what there was for this Saturday, which is not a good omen. In the event that the track conditions are similar to those seen during the uncontested classification, the classification of the only free practice sessions held, those on Friday, will be taken as the grid.
This implies that Lando Norris would be poleman and Verstappen would start last, since he did not go beyond 15th place in free practice and also carries a five-position penalty for replacing a part of his power unit. The Formula 1 game of thrones also comes into play here: would Red Bull accept this result? Will McLaren’s pressure be effective if pole cannot be determined in a standard classification?
Norris, a gifted victory…
That the classification was not disputed does not mean that there was nothing to tell this Saturday. Fortunately, the intense rain that destroyed the classification was not present in the sprint race so, although the liquid element was present, a normal race could be held.
So common was it that they even allowed the wall strategies to come into play. Oscar Piastri, who had achieved minipole on Friday, led comfortably for 22 of the 24 laps. Lando Norris spent almost the entire hour of the session insistently asking his team to give the order to his teammate to let him pass, given that he needs to cut as many points as possible from Verstappen.
At McLaren, who insist on putting unnecessary emotion into the fight to see who is the leader of the team, they decided that with two laps to go they had already put more emotion than necessary and Norris passed without problem to win his first ‘sprint’ of this season. After the McLarens, Max Verstappen entered the finish line, but he was not third in this ‘mini-race’ due to his own character. This time it was not for taking anyone off the track, but because he did not respect the ‘virtual safety car’ conditions when Nico Hulkenberg spun (here the water was already present on the track) and left his Haas lying in the middle of the track.
In this race, Carlos Sainz finished in an improvable fifth position, while his teammate Leclerc was third, with Verstappen sanctioned, which keeps Ferrari as one of the teams of the moment. Fernando Alonso finished much worse, second to last, only surpassing his teammate Lance Stroll, and did not even object to being overtaken by the irrelevant Guanyu Zhou. The best thing for Alonso is that, as soon as this weekend is over, he will only have three weekends left to suffer with this very poor Aston Martin.
