Chinese GP brought new challenges daily. Guess who mastered them all?

On F1’s return to Shanghai Max Verstappen gave a celebratory little power slide out of the hairpin on his final lap, which he completed 13sec clear of the field despite having had a previous 10sec lead wiped out by a safety car. Fernando Alonso made a remarkable save late in the race, rescuing his Aston Martin from around 40-degrees out of line exiting the final turn. Through the twisting Turn 9-10 the cars struggled to get their power down and went through there in an edgy dance between lateral and longitudinal grip.

But actually none of that was the real stuff of significance, merely dramatic flourishes. The real challenge of the Chinese Grand Prix was keeping the tyre surface temperatures between the front and rear axles equalised. To slide the fronts enough to bring them up to the temperature of the rears.

That was Sunday’s challenge, at least. That of the sprint the day before had been a more traditional control of rear tyre core temperatures, a challenge in which the Red Bull and the Ferraris were the best. But with the Ferraris stuck for half the sprint in a train led by the tyre-degrading Aston of Alonso, they didn’t get anywhere near challenging the Red Bulls.

But the track was changing from day to day, as was the wind and the temperature, so the challenge was new each day on F1’s first visit here since pre-Covid days. Verstappen was the master of any of the challenges. The only time that combination had faltered even slightly was in the wet SQ3 of sprint qualifying when the Red Bull’s reluctance to generate tyre temperature had him only fourth on the grid, with Lando Norris’s McLaren on pole by a resounding 1.3sec from Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes and Alonso. The Ferrari, just like the Red Bull, had struggled to generate good tyre temperature, but that was thought to be part of the same usage trait which would make it faster than the McLaren, Mercedes and Aston in the dry. Which it was in the sprint race, but there’s fast and then there’s Max Verstappen’s Red Bull which after taking the lead from Hamilton pulled out 1sec per lap.

That was expected to be the template for the Grand Prix itself – and it was accurate regarding Verstappen. But everything else was very different. Norris’s McLaren, which had suffered such heavy thermal degradation in the sprint, was the only car which came close to Verstappen in how it could meet the tyre-equalising challenge of Sunday and one-stopped its way to a great second, splitting the two-stopping Red Bulls. Once Sergio Perez had found a way by Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari, he’d used up a lot of his tyre and could offer no challenge to Norris.