Five talking points from the Italian Grand Prix

Should there have been a red flag?

The main controversy of the race surrounded a questionable decision from the officials, not for the first time. This one left the Tifosi booing as the race finished tamely under the safety car. Daniel Ricciardo’s McLaren triggered the scenario when he pulled off between the Lesmos having lost his Mercedes engine six laps from the finish. He parked next to a gap in the fence, but the car could not be moved by the marshals alone. Then, once the decision was finally taken to call on the safety car, it picked up third-placed George Russell instead of Verstappen and it took an age to sort the order. In fact, lapped cars remained between the winner and second-placed Charles Leclerc as motorcycling legend Giacomo Agostini waved the chequered flag.

Further to this shambles, the question raised was: why didn’t the race director throw a red flag to ensure the Italian GP would finish under racing conditions? By the letter, Ricciardo hadn’t crashed, there was no barrier damage to repair – but in an age where F1 is so obviously geared towards entertainment and making sure the show comes first as often as possible, it seemed an obvious own goal to rob the Tifosi and the global TV audience of a one or two-lap shoot out. Such a call would have been harsh on Red Bull and Verstappen, who thoroughly earned this victory and did not deserve a late scramble to keep it. But it’s not as if they haven’t been on the positive receiving end of such fortune elsewhere, is it? We can never forget Abu Dhabi 2021.

Two-stop call showed Ferrari’s desperation

One pit stop is usually all that is required at Monza and so it was on this occasion. That Ferrari switched to “plan C” for Leclerc and stopped him a second time only showed how desperate the team was to find an alternative way to beat Verstappen’s superior Red Bull. It never remotely looked like working.

Max wasted little time rising up from his seventh place on the grid to run in the wake of early leader Leclerc. He passed Russell for second at the start of lap five and chased the lead Ferrari until a Virtual Safety Car was called on lap 12 as Sebastian Vettel retired his smoking Aston Martin. Ferrari chose to pit Leclerc at this stage, switching him from soft Pirellis to mediums, but was a little unlucky the VSC ended so quickly as Red Bull kept Verstappen to his strategy and picked up the lead until pitting on lap 25 for the Dutchman’s own set of yellow-walled tyres. The champion re-joined behind Leclerc, soon closed in and a pass looked inevitable – which is why Ferrari rolled the dice on a second stop. Worth a try? Perhaps. But with so little advantage from fresh soft tyres on a day of low degradation, he had nothing in the tank to eat into a gap of just under 20 seconds. His disappointment afterwards was all too obvious, especially in front of the expectant Tifosi.

Verstappen’s championship lead over Leclerc has now stretched to 115 points, meaning the second title could in theory be decided in Singapore at the turn of the month. He’ll need to win again (a fair chance of that on current form) with Leclerc failing to score.

Sainz and Hamilton carve through the field

The long list of drivers demoted on the grid by engine usage penalties made a mockery of qualifying at Monza and it is surely time to review the system to see if there is a better way of punishing unreliability in the cost cap era. As it was, Carlos Sainz and Lewis Hamilton created some spark in a flat race by slicing through the field. Sainz was like a hot knife through butter in the Ferrari to finish fourth behind the impressive Russell, who switched to the hard tyre on lap 24 in his own attempt to find an unlikely way to beat the faster cars ahead of him. That Russell scored his seventh podium of the season and his 15^th top five finish in 16 races was more than sufficient, as three different cars finished in the podium places for the second successive grand prix.

Hamilton took longer than Sainz to work his way through the cars between him and the top points-scoring positions, but he did pull off probably the best move of the race when he opportunistically passed both Lando Norris and Pierre Gasly out of the first chicane. Hamilton finished fifth behind Sainz, with both ahead of Sergio Perez, who like Leclerc stopped twice after a very early stop for hard tyres because of a fiery front brake disc.

McLaren loses chance for big gain on Alpine

The chase for fourth-best team looks set to be a running theme through the rest of the season. At Monza, McLaren appeared ready to make a big dent in Alpine’s points advantage with a double score from Norris and Ricciardo – until the Australian’s engine trouble scotched that late in the race. Norris finished seventh on another day of frustration for the young Brit. He was set to clear the battling Ricciardo and Gasly, only for a slow pitstop to scupper that plan. Instead, he re-joined behind his team-mate and ran side by side through the first chicane with the AlphaTauri, as Hamilton made full use of his fully warmed and fresh soft tyres to out-accelerate both on the run to Curva Grande. Norris did at least beat Gasly, but with Fernando Alonso failing to finish in his overheating Alpine and Esteban Ocon coming home an anonymous 11^th, McLaren’s gain on the Anglo-French team was less than it might have been. The pair are now separated by 18 points, but with six races left to run it’s still all to play for – with millions of dollars on the line over which can finish fourth.

De Vries scores on impressive F1 debut

Behind Gasly, Nyck de Vries completed an accomplished last-minute F1 debut by scoring a couple of points for Williams in ninth, seeing off Alfa Romeo’s Zhou Guanyu as he did so. What a weekend for the 2021 Formula E world champion. It started with the Mercedes protégé showing well in a first free practice session run for Aston Martin. Then on Saturday morning Alex Albon was diagnosed with appendicitis and was ruled out from racing, so de Vries suddenly found himself wearing his second set of team overalls in a single weekend – novel in itself in the modern era. He acquitted himself well in qualifying, making it through to Q2 and found himself lining up an amazing eighth on the grid thanks to those pesky penalties for rivals ahead of him. To only drop a single position on Sunday afternoon and deliver such valuable points for Williams shows what we already knew: he clearly deserves a permanent race drive somewhere on the F1 grid in 2023. Beside Ocon at Alpine or Albon at Williams? Both teams could do a lot worse.

Images courtesy of Motorsport Images.