With an indisputably superior car, probably the most dominant in the history of the competition, Max Verstappen spent the last two years without any other member of the grid being able to put any pressure on him. When things are equal between the workshops and there is more than one car capable of winning, the Dutchman continues to have something more than the rest as was clear this Sunday in Montmeló, where the current champion accumulated his seventh victory of the season, in a scenario which made it clear that the panorama has changed to the misfortune of Red Bull and to the happiness of the fans, who now can no longer say that Formula 1 is boring because it is monotonous. Last year, Verstappen managed in the circuit what is known as grand chelemthe name given to the perfect weekend of someone who leads all the rehearsal sessions, takes the pole, the victory and the fastest lap. In that 2023 test, Mad Max He was 24 seconds ahead of Lewis Hamilton, the second place finisher. This time, the final result was the same, the triumph, although the workmanship had nothing to do with those. In fact, Verstappen couldn’t even start without traffic due to Lando Norris’ state of grace, and after completing the 66 laps he crossed the finish line with only two seconds ahead of the British driver from McLaren, who is on a roll and even made him shiver. to the energy garage. The podium was completed by Hamilton, the first for the multi-time champion, while Carlos Sainz finished sixth and Fernando Alonso finished 12th, bottled up among the Aston Martin peloton.
Verstappen pushes, but he no longer suffocates like before if we take into account the details left by the tenth stop on the calendar, the first of three in a row, which will surely define which second part of the World Cup we will attend. If his car no longer sweeps, the Red Bull boy does not tremble when others do. In Barcelona, Norris hesitated at the worst moment, that of the start, where George Russell caught him and Verstappen behind him, to momentarily take the lead of the peloton with a delicious maneuver on the outside, which allowed him to take three places in a single brake. Who knows if, enthralled by what he had just done, the runner from Norfolk misjudged when to drop anchor at the end of the straight, just two laps later, and that miscalculation left a clear world for the pilot of the red buffalo brand. , which burned him from the outside and took the lead, a position that only Norris was able to put in relative danger in the last two laps, in which the McLaren driver, riding in the prototype that has improved the most throughout the entire year, he once again made it clear that if he has weapons he can win any battle.
Norris was a couple of laps away from being able to catch Verstappen and have a chance of repeating the Miami crash. However, at the level he is at and his coach, opportunities will come sooner rather than later. Neither the second place nor the fastest lap sweetened the bitter taste with which the kid left Montmeló, conscious of having wasted a bullet because of that calamitous exit. “Here we had the best car, so we should have won,” lamented the McLaren driver, who agreed in his diagnosis with the winner. “This time we were not the fastest,” summarized Verstappen, who already has 61 victories on his service record. In Spain, the leader of the points table climbed to the top for the 106th time, exactly the same as Alain Prost and Alonso.
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