By Joe Murphy
A perfectly timed Safety Car helped Lando Norris take hsi first victory in Formula 1 after over 100 races. The McLaren has been so often the Bridesmaid never the Bride, but that all changed when F1 raced in Miami this past weekend.
At the start of the race, Verstappen lead from Piastri, as the other McLaren man had taken advantage of a Sergio Perez error that effected both Ferrari drivers. However, unusually, Max couldn’t pull away and build a lead, with the gap remaining at around the 3 second mark. Max hit a bollard which brought out a thirty second VSC, but nobody towards the front could capitalise.
A handful of laps later, Magnussen put his Haas where it has no right to be and subsequently took out home nation hero; Logan Sergeant. This brought out a much more elongated Safety Car, just a couple of laps after all the original front four had boxed. This meant Lando, who had held out longer on his medium tyre stint, inherited the lead.
With 24 laps to go on the restart, it was thankfully uneventful. Verstappen never really mounted a challenge and instead had Charles Leclerc closer to him behind. Norris kept building that lead and eventually crossed the line to take maximum points for the first time by a clear 7-second margin. Verstappen took second and Leclerc held his Ferrari teammate off for the final podium position as Ferrari took P3 and P4. Sergio Perez managed to hold off a race-y Lewis Hamilton as the pair claimed P5 and P6 respectively.
Lando’s win will understandably take the headlines, and deservedly so. However, Yuki Tsunoda did remarkably well to claim solid points for Team RB. This isn’t the first time we’ve said that this season.
George Russell could only claim lowly points, the same for Fernando Alonso. But it was a good day for Alpine who scored their first point of the season to move up to P8 in the Constructor’s standings after Estaban Ocon crossed the line P10, holding off Haas’ Nico Hulkenberg by just over a second.
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