It’s the second race of the season and a weekend of more early starts for us fans wanting to get in on the action. We have the first sprint of the season in China with a few changes to the format as there is only 1 hour of free practice, and this is the first of six sprint weekends. The Chinese Grand Prix made its debut in 2004 but returned to the calendar for the first time last year since 2019 due to Covid. The race takes place in Shanghai, and the track features 16 turns, seven left and nine right. The circuit is also designed to look like the Chinese symbol for ‘shang’, meaning upwards. The track length is 5.451km, and the racing lap record from the first race in 2004 still stands today, set by the legendary Michael Schumacher. The first seven Chinese Grand Prix were all won by different drivers, and Lewis Hamilton has the most wins and pole positions here. Ahead of this years event, the circuit has been fully resurfaced, ready to set some challenges for the team, the drivers, and also for Pirelli.
Sprint qualifying saw Lewis secure the top spot and share the front row with Max Verstappen. Although started on the grid in second is a great result, Red Bull must have been feeling disappointed with Liam Lawson starting at the back, definitely two ends of the spectrum there and it didn’t get much better for Lawson in the sprint either. Lewis got off to a strong start defending off Max and then Piastri when Piastri got past Max. It wasn’t a totally easy race for him, though, as Lewis was experiencing graining on the tyres at one stage. However, he managed this well, which led him to win the race. Another stand-out performance was from Yuki Tsunoda, who showed who really should have got the other Red Bull seat, with an impressive sixth place finish. Lando Norris on the other hand only just managed to scrape his way into points with an eighth place finish after a wide moment early on cost him places, however luckily for him in the closing stages of the race, he managed to snatch the last points place.
We then move on to the qualifying for the actual race, which was a close battle for pole position between Piastri and George. Delivering a time of 1m 30.641s, Piastri won the position of P1 over Russell by just under one tenth of a second. With Russell on his final lap finding a chunk of lap time, this gained him the other place on the front row, leaving Norris having to settle for P3. Max was able to take P4 with both Ferrari drivers taking P5 & P6. A surprising outcome for Lewis considering the results he achieved in the sprint qualifying. Isack Hadjar for Racing Bulls achieved an impressive seventh on the grid, outperforming his team mate Yuki Tsunoda, who came in P9. Another great qualifying for Williams saw Albon take the last position of the top 10, and in P8, we have the Mercedes rookie that is Antonelli. On the worrying side of things, Lawson again failed to make it out of round one of qualifying and again started in the last place. I really hope he is able to turn things around sooner rather than later.
Moving onto the race, which I have to say was pretty boring, but I had a feeling it would be, and so I will keep this short. Piastri won. Just kidding, Piastri pretty much had it under control from start to finish and only lost the lead briefly when it came to pitting. Norris was struggling with fading brakes towards the end of the race. However, he had another advantage over Russel to worry about him taking second off of him. Max didn’t have a great start to the race and dropped back a few places, however in true Verstappen style he didn’t give up and found some pace in the second half of the race and with four laps to go, he passed Leclerc and finished in fourth. Then we go to Ferrari, I honestly don’t know how they manage to get it so wrong every time but they do and so what was a fifth and sixth finish, ended on them both being disqualified as well as Gasly for underweight cars. The only car not to finish this time was Alonso, who unfortunately has had a back to back DNF. This time was due to his brakes being on fire.
Shortly after their disqualification Ferrari put out a statement explaining as to why both of their cars were found not to conform to regulations. They stated that Charles was a one-stop strategy and that meant his tyre wear was very high. As for for Lewis they claimed to have misjudged the consumption by a small margin. Haas expressed how happy they were with the results from the weekend and I’m not surprised as they said “our best points haul in one weekend since Austria 2022.” Ayao Komatsu has also spoken out about the end results saying “I wasn’t expecting to score 14 points, if somebody had told me we could score one point, I’d have been happy. It’s an amazing result. I’m looking forward to working together as a team and improving this car.” This currently puts Haas 6th out of the 10 teams in the constructors championship, but it is only the beginning of the season, so there is still plenty of time to climb that ladder and improve their seventh place finish on last season.
Overall, it was an ok race weekend, but not every race is going to be exciting. I am normally not a fan of the sprint weekends as usually it is like watching the same race twice and I don’t know, there just isn’t as much excitement or build up for the race on Sunday, however, I actually thought the sprint was a lot better than the actual race. Sometimes it just feels like the race could be over in half the laps it takes because the results can be that obvious but there’s still some interesting results to be looking at such as double points for both Williams and Haas which is rather a big deal for those two teams and also Albon has got more points from two races than he had in the whole of the 2024 season, so it will be interesting to see how that pans out throughout the season. We also have a few new drives that aren’t having a good start to the season, so it will be interesting to see if they are still with us at the halfway point. We will have to see what happens in Japan in a few weeks’ time!
Current Driver Standings
| Pos | Driver | Nationality | Car | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Norris | GBR | McLaren Mercedes | 44 |
| 2 | Verstappen | NED | Red Bull Racing Honda RBPT | 36 |
| 3 | Russell | GBR | Mercedes | 35 |
| 4 | Piastri | AUS | McLaren Mercedes | 34 |
| 5 | Antonelli | ITA | Mercedes | 22 |
| 6 | Albon | THA | Williams Mercedes | 16 |
| 7 | Ocon | FRA | Haas Ferrari | 10 |
| 8 | Stroll | CAN | Aston Martin Aramco Mercedes | 10 |
| 9 | Hamilton | GBR | Ferrari | 9 |
| 10 | Leclerc | MON | Ferrari | 8 |
| 11 | Hulkenberg | GER | Kick Sauber Ferrari | 6 |
| 12 | Bearman | GBR | Haas Ferrari | 4 |
| 13 | Tsunoda | JPN | Racing Bulls Honda RBPT | 3 |
| 14 | Sainz | ESP | Williams Mercedes | 1 |
| 15 | Hadjar | FRA | Racing Bulls Honda RBPT | 0 |
| 16 | Gasly | FRA | Alpine Renault | 0 |
| 17 | Lawson | NZL | Red Bull Racing Honda RBPT | 0 |
| 18 | Doohan | AUS | Alpine Renault | 0 |
| 19 | Bortoleto | BRA | Kick Sauber Ferrari | 0 |
What did you think of the Chinese Grand Prix?
Amy x
littlemissminor.com 