A Thrilling Finale in Imola
Round 7 of F1 2024 in Imola: What Happened?
If there is one thing I learned from one of the best days of my life, is that when you go to a GP in person, you don’t watch the GP at all: you live it. Believe me when I tell you that it’s as if we hadn’t followed anything — or almost anything — of what happened on the track.
Because a live GP is something else: it is breathing the very essence of the passion of motorsport.
In this article I will tell you what happened in the race, which I had to watch entirely again the next day, adding some of my impressions of what I saw.
However, I will post a different article where I will instead review the whole experience as if it were a diary because I thought it would be better to separate the two things. It would have been too long a piece.
What is there to say? A circuit like this doesn’t offer excitement on the track, as we’ve seen: too narrow, it can’t contain two cars trying to overtake each other in many part of it.
But it’s not on the track where you feel emotions: you feel them within the track, I don’t know if you catch my drift.
It’s experiencing the atmosphere of the GP that emotionally compensates for everything that the race doesn’t offer: the wait, the anxiety, the celebration with the Tifosi, the emotion of a crash in the gravel, the podium with the usual winner.
For this reason, while we were in the Rivazza field, we kept watching the cars pass one after the other without taking into account which lap it was. For example, we didn’t know about Albon’s DNF.
After a while, we lost track of time and like a blink of an eye, we found ourselves on the last lap. Meanwhile, I was getting comments from friends back home telling me how boring it was. But then again, I’ll tell you about the live experience in another piece.
From a sporting point of view, half the race was almost unchallenged by Max with Lando’s McLaren struggling to catch up to him and the Ferraris in turn trying to catch up to the McLaren.
In the second part, the fight for victory was becoming more exciting than ever. Let’s see step by step what happened.
At the start, Lando sets himself almost parallel to Max but the Dutchman contains him and remains first. Almost all the positions remain the same, as always happens now in Imola: a sort of miniature train like in Monte Carlo.
The two Ferraris go wheel to wheel on the straight with Leclerc trying to attack Norris but then giving up because the next corner is not in his favor.
In these first laps, the top three teams go more or less at the same pace. Verstappen and Norris are slightly further behind, while Leclerc, Sainz and Piastri act like a single group.
Above all, Piastri’s pace is impressive in this phase while he remains constantly close to Sainz’s heels.
From our view from the Rivazza, we could clearly see the front wing of the McLaren always dangerously close to the Ferrari, sharp like a spear ready to deliver the blow at the necessary moment.
On lap 8 he tries to attack Sainz at the Tamburello but Carlos stays in the center and protects himself. So Oscar anticipates the braking and lets him go. The McLaren has a really interesting top speed, which is the flaw that denotes the Ferrari when it has a heavier fuel load.
Meanwhile, Max begins to create a gap with Lando, while Albon, who has just changed tyres, starts to have problems. On lap 11 he goes to box again: it turns out that it was a poorly secured tyre that gave him trouble.
Everything proceeds as always, only Piastri gets closer and closer and copies Sainz’s trajectories, but there’s nothing he can do: he can’t pass him.
Norris loses his distance from Max, thus allowing Charles to get closer to him. The Ferrari starts to perform better than Norris, who feels the degradation on the rear.
I summarize this phase like this: McLaren and Ferrari play cat-and-mouse. When one is in difficulty, the other reacts and comes closer but without getting away with it. Sometimes the red ones are better, sometimes the orange ones.
On lap 18, Pérez goes wide in the Rivazza. We see him enter his Red Bull into the gravel in front of us. A roar rose from the audience, between various screams and “NOO!” as the wind moved the sand towards us.
A guy behind me said wryly: “The wrong driver came out.”
Needless to say, we were hoping it was Max, but we knew that wasn’t the case. Lando said the same thing in the cool-down room at the end of the race: “Please, be Max!”. And the Dutchman laughed at him with that icy and feral smile.
Other than that, it’s absolute calm. On lap 23 the waters move when there is the first pit stop among the top drivers: it’s Lando, after Russell stopped the previous lap.
Let’s be clear: Mercedes were never in the race. The gray of their car is no longer the sparkling and brilliant one of the past decade and what we are seeing is perhaps the worst car of those post-’21. That shiny gray has given way to a pale, opaque, and nebulous light.
In any case, Norris stops as I was saying on lap 23 and unfortunately returns behind Pérez. It’s not good news for the Englishman because the Mexican follows a different strategy, being on hard tyres from the start of the race and therefore with the mandatory stop still far away on his horizon.
Lando probably paid for a slightly longer pit stop and as we know, tenths are very expensive in this sport.
Max, on the other hand, remains firmly in command of the race, and not even the black and white flag indicating the risk of penalties intimidate him, at least for now. Too many track limits for the Dutchman. Indeed, from this point of the race he starts to behave differently.
On lap 25 he goes to box and returns to P4 behind Hamilton. The Ferraris find themselves in command of the GP and it becomes a challenge for the team to understand what to do: shall we call them now and get back between Max and the McLarens?
Charles is immediately called on the following lap and fortunately for him returns ahead of Piastri. However, the Australian keeps staying close to him and gains ground even on Sainz who is first, and indeed he starts chasing Leclerc by copying his moves.
The two drivers overtake Pérez together. At that point, Carlos Sainz would have hoped for a Safety Car, as the team did, but this results only in a waste of time.
As a matter of fact, due to this strategic error, he falls into P6 even behind Pérez. However, the Mexican knows it’s not his game, so he gives in to the Spaniard who passes him to Tamburello. Probably one of the worst races by Checo.
Halfway through the race the situation is flatter than ever: it seems that the drivers will no longer go to box even if the degradation is high.
The Ferrari struggles only in the first sector, particularly at Tamburello, and it seems like we are witnessing a déjà vu: Oscar Piastri trying to overtake a Ferrari, but this time that of Charles in P3.
There are still many laps away and the drivers’ timings go up and down like a seesaw. So let’s take a leap forward: let’s move on to lap 39.
No Safety Car, everyone changed tyres and the Ferraris are flying: Charles gains many tenths on Norris.
That’s the most interesting fact of the whole GP: McLaren and Ferrari, despite the hierarchies, came very close to Red Bull on a track notoriously favorable to the Milton Keynes team.
This is the first indication that the upgrades give us. Who knows: should we expect a season in which the fight becomes more heated than in recent years?
Just look at what happened in the final phase of the race.
Charles dangerously gets into Norris’ DRS area. I’m sure that if it had been another track, the overtaking would have come, and this also applies to both of them if Charles was ahead of Lando: the two teams are practically at par.
But the leitmotif of Imola is: you really struggle to overtake driving these cars and — let’s underline it — with this DRS which no longer gives the same advantage as in the past.
The fight for second place calms down when Charles makes a small mistake at the Variante Alta by going out. A bit like in the ’22 GP which cost him the podium dearly: bad memories. It’s Charles’ usual impulsiveness: always pushing the car to the limit.
Let’s conclude with this: the final phase is objectively the most exciting one.
Max goes slower, really slower than Norris both due to the various lapped drivers on the way and due to a certain difficulty with the tyres, as we hear from his complaining team radio: a bluff? Was he just managing? Who knows. Surely, he wants to pay attention to track limits.
And Lando’s beautiful final sprint begins, and if he had had even just one more lap, he would have repeated the success of Miami, I’m sure.
The gap between him and Max narrows frighteningly lap after lap: Lando flies, flies, flies. Like a drop that digs into the rock: a tireless and inexorable ambush.
From Rivazza we saw them very close and with each passing lap, seeing them closer and closer, we couldn’t hold back the euphoria. They almost touched at that braking point. By 78 thousandths, he doesn’t take the DRS on the penultimate lap. Phew!
Max must certainly build a statue of Hülkenberg who gave him the slipstream for pole position in qualifying: a shameful thing to do for a Ferrari-powered driver, but that’s the racing world. They’re sharks.
But hard-earned victories are the best, and Max’s is a hard-earned victory. Just 7-tenths of a second between the two. This is the F1 we like. There is struggle, there is uncertainty: what more do we want?
Soon I will publish the emotional tale of the event ;)
