How Ferrari's Imola F1 blunders gave Verstappen a lonely cruise to maximum points

Red Bull had been quicker than Ferrari every time it mattered heading into the grand prix at Imola last weekend. But it was only in front by a whisker. Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz therefore had the capacity to make their rivals break a sweat in the fight for victory during the full-length Sunday race.

Instead, facing the pressure of a home event, the Maranello pair made critical errors and enabled Max Verstappen to escape to the spoils in dominant fashion. In truth, after only a few hundred metres the defending champion never looked under threat.

Neither Verstappen nor Leclerc nailed their final laps in qualifying on Friday but by better adhering to the slippery conditions with a gentle right foot, the Dutch driver was able to seize pole for the sprint contest. His launch was impeded by some suspect clutch work that generated too much wheelspin before patchy gear synchronisation allowed Leclerc to sweep into the lead. Yet, as per the indications from FP2, Verstappen had the edge over his opponent's graining soft-compound Pirelli rubber. He recovered to claim eight points for a Saturday triumph.

If the pace of the F1-75 had been second-best in the dry, Ferrari spirits should have been buoyed when the clouds over the Emilia Romagna region burst three hours before the race. What’s more, the rain shower lingered long enough to ensure the entire field had to start the 63 laps on intermediates. The weather might have been the joker needed to stop Red Bull from stitching together its strongest weekend of the 2022 Formula 1 season so far.

It was not to be, however, as Leclerc immediately eased the challenge facing Verstappen courtesy of a duff launch. Having rocketed so well out of his box 23 hours earlier to get the jump on the RB18 well before the braking zone into Tamburello, switching to the right-hand side of the grid would prove far less kind.

Leclerc endured the worst of both worlds. He bogged down off the line having pulled away in second gear and when Leclerc then shifted into fourth, a spike of torque belatedly delivered the wheelspin he’d been trying to avoid.

Verstappen seized control at the start as both Ferraris starting from the right-hand side struggled away from the lights

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Despite the kink on the pitstraight, which briefly gave Leclerc the inside line and shortened how far he had to travel, Verstappen was already clear. Worse still, third-starting Sergio Perez and Lando Norris from fifth also scarpered away better from the left-side of the grid to get the jump. And to compound the initial Ferrari misery, Sainz copied his team-mate. The Spaniard was lethargic off the line and then the rear wheels broke traction and he violently jerked to right. He caught the slide but ceded a position to the second McLaren of Daniel Ricciardo on the approach to Tamburello.

Following the race’s post-mortem, Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto said of the start: “We have done our analysis and discussing with the drivers. We looked at the data. I think that both drivers managed very well the procedure at the start, and they were spot on. What happens is that we are lacking grip. On that side of the track, I think that there was really more, let me say, wet patches.”

Ferrari’s credentials diminished even further when two red cars became one. News of Sainz’s freshly inked contract extension broke on Thursday ahead of a GP that would take place in front of a sell-out 65,000 crowd comprising mainly of the tifosi. He was hoping to bounce back after his error in Australia that caused him to spin to the gravel, but no dice.

"There's always going to be one race where you get bumped out. And for me, unfortunately, it has happened consecutively" Carlos Sainz

After Ricciardo had got alongside on the inside on the dash to the first chicane on lap one for fifth spot, Sainz left racing room. But Ricciardo took too much of the painted inside kerb and, with the track damp, he skated into the side of the Ferrari, and it rotated. For the second race in a row, Sainz was beached.

Many have been quick to declare Leclerc’s championship lead as reason enough to give him the status of de facto number one Ferrari driver this term. That wasn’t quashed by Sainz’s latest shunt, as he bids to find a run of form and defy the support role for which he has already been cast. Sainz was perhaps less perturbed than many expected.

“Oh, well it is very simple,” he said. “In Australia, I was completely at fault. And here after reviewing the footage, I think I couldn't have done anything more to give Daniel more space. So, two completely different incidents with very similar outcomes.

“The tough thing is that they come in a consecutive manner because over the season, there's always going to be one race where you do a mistake. And there's always going to be one race where you get bumped out. And for me, unfortunately, it has happened consecutively. It's why it hurts more and it's tougher. But hopefully we get them done nice and early in the season and now we can start focusing on the rest of the year.”

For the second race in a row, Ferrari's challenge was blunted by an early Sainz retirement, this time after contact with Ricciardo

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

While Sainz sought to put an optimistic spin on his hasty retirement, it inescapably weakened the Ferrari challenge as Leclerc was left to do battle on his own.

The sole use of the safety car came at the end of the opening tour to mop up the Sainz mess, and it peeled back into the pits three laps later as the RB18s dash away unchallenged. It took until lap eight for Leclerc to relieve Norris of third, passing with the aid of the slipstream on the run to Tamburello. But the Monegasque was now 2.8s adrift of Perez, who in turn had slipped 3.3s behind Verstappen.

As the field increasingly began to weave off a drying racing line in search of patches of water to cool the fading intermediate tyres, Leclerc could slightly exceed Perez’s race pace to close to within 1.3s. Verstappen, meanwhile, was quicker than the pair of them and his advantage climbed towards a full 7s.

Following the collision with Sainz and having pitted for a fresh set of inters, Ricciardo’s race was already in tatters. That allowed McLaren to switch to a glorified test programme, including pitting the Australian for slicks on lap 16. Equipped with medium tyres, Ricciardo soon turned in a series of personal best sectors to indicator the crossover had arrived.

Perez was the first of the leaders to flinch, stopping for the yellow-walled C3s on lap 18 before Leclerc – the prancing horse mechanics having dashed out into the pitlane the previous lap – followed Verstappen in for dry tyres next time around. Here Ferrari made another error. Both rears were slow getting serviced to bleed away another 1.4s as Red Bull aced its champion’s change.

The new-for-2022 blanket temperatures, down from 100 to 70 degrees Celsius, ensured Perez was slow on his out-lap and Leclerc initially had the jump for second. But then he felt the shackles of the cooler rubber and was a sitting duck for the recovering Red Bull into Villeneuve as the 1-2 running order was restored with Verstappen in the lead. And when Perez locked his front-left into Variante Alta and skipped over the chicane to hit the grass, Leclerc couldn’t capitalise.

Verstappen swiftly re-established his 7s cushion after stopping. If anything, as per his FP2 simulations and late form in the sprint, Verstappen was even happier on dry tyres. The gap eventually exceeded 13s to Perez, with Leclerc another 3s in arrears. It was becoming more and more apparent with 15 laps to run that Ferrari didn’t have an answer for the speed of the lead Red Bull or the track position of Perez. It had to roll the dice.

Once on slicks, Verstappen increased his pace still further

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

On lap 49, Leclerc pitted for a set of the quickest tyres that were on offer in Italy, the C4 softs. Ferrari was seemingly only on course for third in a straight fight, so when the fronts started to grain and Leclerc approached lapped cars, the team had to ask the question of Red Bull. At the very least, Leclerc might nab a point for fastest lap.

“We were not running out of front tyres,” Binotto confirmed. “But we believed that there was no opportunity for us to attack and overtake Perez with those tyres anymore. We saw there could have been an opportunity and a possibility, and we went for it.”

Perez pitted the next lap to cover off the immediate threat from Leclerc, while Verstappen came in a lap later. The champion had requested to be put on the same strategy as his Ferrari rival, but Red Bull was already one step ahead and swapped him onto softs despite the mediums already fitted having enough life to make the chequered flag.

"On that lap, I knew that there was an opportunity. I tried to push a bit more, and it was too much" Charles Leclerc

Back behind Perez, Leclerc had spent much of the race observing where the RB18 was weakest. That was through Variante Alta, site of Perez’s excursion. Given it fed into the DRS detection zone, if Leclerc could carry more speed through the right-left he stood a chance of closing and deploying the overtaking aid in tandem with a strong tow. Fastest lap helped shrink the gap to just five tenths.

However, the Bahrain and Australia winner was too greedy. On lap 53, Leclerc clattered over the inside kerb through the first part of the chicane. The car was unsettled, and he spun. The F1-75 squarely glanced the tyre wall to prevent terminal suspension damage, but the front wing was broken, and all hope of a podium vanished. Leclerc recovered the car to the pits to emerge in ninth after the most critical of all the Ferrari mistakes at Imola.

“I felt like it was probably one of the corners where Checo was a bit less competitive than me,” said Leclerc. “Obviously on that lap, I knew that there was an opportunity. I tried to push a bit more, and it was too much. It was the mistake that cost me a lot and I'll learn from it.”

Kevin Magnussen, Sebastian Vettel, and Yuki Tsunoda fell victim to Leclerc late on, but sixth was the best the Ferrari could manage across the line. Verstappen, meanwhile, could cruise across the line with 16.5s in hand over Perez to tie with Leclerc on two GP wins apiece so far this term. His late fastest lap dash plus victory in the sprint combined for a maximum possible haul of 34 points in his efforts to make amends for the car unreliability at Sakhir and Albert Park.

Leclerc's spin cost a certain podium and meant he had to fight back to sixth, losing out to Norris, Russell and Bottas

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

“The start of the season in general wasn’t amazing so we needed a good weekend,” said Verstappen. “I didn’t expect it to be like this. The way we handled the race, we didn’t make any mistakes, the team made the right calls with switching from the intermediates to the slicks and from then on just controlled the race.

“It might look easy on the TV, but we still have to be focused, avoid the backmarkers as it is easy to go off-line or to lock up or go over a wet patch and go over the track. We managed that and the car was handling really well.”

With Perez third in the sprint and second on Sunday, Red Bull was only one point shy of the maximum possible team score, too. Reflecting on the squad’s first 1-2 since the 2016 Malaysian GP, boss Christian Horner added: “This has to be one of our best-ever results.

“[It was a] phenomenal team performance because we took a bit of a risk coming into the weekend with a couple of small parts we introduced the car, which is always tricky when you've only got one [practice session during a sprint weekend]. But we attacked the weekend from the word go, and both drivers have been unbelievable.”

Verstappen and Perez were not far shy of perfect on the day. So much so, Ferrari had to ask a question of them late on in the GP, the Scuderia having stumbled multiple times throughout the weekend. But Red Bull quite comfortably had an answer to take what looked only to be a small gap in performance between the two and make it seem like something of a chasm.

Red Bull's 1-2 on Ferrari's home soil has changed the complexion of the championship fight, now just nine points in arrears in the constructors' battle

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