What a race. Undoubtedly the most emotional race of this season.
Well Max screwed that one up. Was going too fast while trying to avoid the incident.
I bet Bono will be loving not having some whiney bitch on the other end of the radio.
Can't really blame Max tbh. Leclerc divebombed into Perez, almost costing him the race. Thank fuck he had the strongest of comebacks and managed to win.
I'm sad that Russel was completely cheated out of his victory, but I can't say I'm not glad Perez got his first podium. A fucking shame this guy is most likely not going to be around next season. Not just a shame, a fucking travesty.
On the matter of Leclerc, this is exactly what Vettel complained about last race. Leclerc did this several times, at both starts, he did it with Vettel and then again with (I think) Sainz. This is the kind of rookie mistake that we've seen with Kvyat and Verstappen at the beginning of their Red Bull days, trying to get past someone else with an overtake that boils down to either the other guy backing down completely or they crash and end up in the gravel.
Hope that the stewards don't penalise Checo for the Lap 1 incident. He did swing over and not give Charles enough space but Charles shouldn't have been charging up the inside like it was Suzuka 1990 all over again. I would say it was Checo 30% fault, Charles 70% with Max the innocent bystander, but it was first lap so wouldn't dish out any penalties.
Charles has been summoned to go and sit on the naughty step have a meeting with the stewards at 22:30 local time (12 minutes away)
As stated above, I see absolutely no wrongdoing on Perez' side. Leclerc tried to stab into a gap that wasn't there and punted Perez off the track. I assume Leclerc will get a stern talking-to, not Checo.
At least they screwed Bottas as hard as they screwed George. Would have been Bullshit for merc to be celebrating a win after that.
We're not out of the green yet. FIA might still decide to give Russel a disqualification and hearing from the German commentators, it does sound like that is pretty likely. Which is... brutal. Whoever is at fault, cost Russel his victory and ruined Bottas' race as well. I can't come up with many comparable or worse pitstops, no matter how hard I try. The only things that come to mind is a double pitstop by Ferrari, where they didn't have a full set of tires for their second driver for being somewhat similarly worse and Jos Verstappen's pitstop in '94, where fuel was spilled all over the car and it went up in a huge fireball.
What was up with the pit crew ffs? If I was a more suspecting person, I might think that someone threw a wrench into Russels race, cause that amount of bad luck was just surreal.
And indeed, if this had somehow gone through without costing Bottas his race, I might actually think that.
The only thing that is the tiniest bit of a glimmer of good in all this: Russel had a great start, an absolutely amazing race, did everything perfectly, even after that abortion of a pitstop, he managed to catch up once they pitted him again to remove the wrong tires, then they had a puncture and again he raced like the devil to end 9th.
So, at least the guy could show off his absolutely astonishing level of skill in a multitude of situations and even with that pitstop fail (ie_: without the puncture), I think he would have won.
Russel put Bottas in his place (which is sad for Bottas tbh) and frankly, even without the victory, he single-handedly tore to pieces Hamiltons legacy, so there's that.
