Key events
Is Formula One inherently … British?
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That should be in reference to Kimi Antonelli, who had the pole for Saturday’s sprint race.
Lando Norris wound up winning that sprint race.
Preamble: Hey, it’s competitive now!
In case you haven’t been following F1 this season, we have some surprising news.
It’s competitive again.
Max Verstappen’s rapid overtaking of Lewis Hamilton’s records no longer seems inevitable. He’s in third place behind the two young McLaren drivers, Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris, who are rewarding their team’s youth movement with stellar seasons so far. Piastri debuted in 2023 and finished ninth overall, then climbed to fourth last year. Norris was second last year, building on the momentum of his first Formula One win — in Miami, site of today’s race.
Just two years ago, Verstappen and Red Bull teammate Sergio Perez won all but one race through the whole season. This year, with Perez having left Formula 1 for the time being, Verstappen has one win in five races, and his teammate just changed from Liam Lawson to Yuki Tsunoda, neither of whom has ever been on the podium.
Six drivers are in their first full season, led by Italian prodigy Andrea Kimi Antonelli, George Russell’s teammate at Mercedes. The 18-year-old debuted with a fourth-place finish and stands sixth on the season — one ahead of the man he replaced, the aforementioned 40-year-old seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton.
In other words, the standings are …
1. Piastri (McLaren), 106
2. Norris (McLaren), 97
3. Verstappen (Red Bull), 87
4. Russell (Mercedes), 78
5. Leclerc (Ferrari), 47
6. Antonelli (Mercedes), 40
7. Hamilton (Ferrari), 37
No one else has more than 20. The only other drivers with top-5 finishes this year are Alexander Albon and Esteban Ocon, who are eighth and ninth in the standings.
Beau will be here shortly, in the meantime here’s Giles Richards on the Miami GP’s rise:
With a sellout once more expected, this weekend’s Miami Grand Prix is building on an appeal to a younger, diverse audience that is a key part of Formula One’s burgeoning success in the US. Making its mark on the calendar with a grand, spectacular party in the Florida sunshine since the inaugural race in 2022, Miami is considered something of a showcase.
The opening blast of the three meetings now held in the US is a shop window for the sport with three teams, Racing Bulls, Sauber and Ferrari boasting special liveries for the event this weekend. The flamingo pink of the RB is very much making a splash but the clunky corporate blue addition to the Scuderia’s scarlet has fallen very flat with fans.
Naysayers may have disliked Miami’s emphasis on being a show, of presenting a weekend of entertainment where the food and beverages (or F&B as it is bafflingly, for the uninitiated, referred to here) were as fundamental as the racing. Where the atmosphere went hand in hand with the competition. It was perhaps the first of the “event” races F1 wanted to promote and like it or not, it has succeeded with numbers around this race telling their own story.
The atmosphere in the general admission – campus – area of the increasingly popular and affordable tickets away from the high-end hospitality which dominates all the media, is one of unadulterated enjoyment, shot through with the glorious absence of world-weary cynicism. There is an air of, whisper it, hedonism; not all racing must be accompanied by sombre beard-scratching from a grassy bank in the rain.
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