“It was tough to make the right calls,” he admitted. But even once he’d got his big lead there were still more hoops to jump through. “Just when you think you’re going to have, let’s say, an easy ride home, they tell me 10, 15 laps before the end, there’s some rain coming again. And this time it was not just some rain, it was quite a lot. So we pit for inters and within a lap it almost becomes undriveable on an inter and we opted to go to an extreme. But the problem we have at the moment is that the intermediate is basically too good compared to the extreme. So even when there’s a downpour like that you still actually want to be on an inter because it’s faster, but at one point there were so many rivers on the track it just becomes incredibly dangerous. So at the time, I was a bit, well, not upset, but disappointed with the red flag. But I guess in hindsight, with so many people on intermediates it was probably the right thing to do.”
“Max is in a period of his career where he’s simply untouchable and I don’t think there’s any driver on the grid that would be able to achieve what he’s been doing in that car,” said Christian Horner. “I think what we’re witnessing at the moment is a driver that is generational.”
So it’s impressive that the 42-year-old guy in the Aston Martin (updated with a new floor) was there pushing him on the restart after the red flag with eight laps to go. Alonso had pulled a brilliant move on George Russell’s Mercedes to go third on the opening lap and another on Lando Norris’s McLaren to go second a lap later. Like Verstappen, he pitted for inters a lap after Perez and so also came out well behind, so wet was the track in that extra lap. But he never gave up hope and on the restart he was filling Verstappen’s mirrors, stalking him. “The final restart, I knew that my first lap the whole weekend already has not been the best with [tyre] warm-up, so I knew that I had to survive that first lap of his attack. And yeah, Fernando was pushing very hard behind.”
Alonso puts the pressure on at the restart
Getty via Red Bull
“I was not conservative, let’s say!” said Alonso. “I thought about what to do, a lot, in the red flag period. So I thought, what were the possibilities, obviously, the move into Turn 2 was something that was in my head, also into Turn 1… So yeah, at the restart, I tried in Turn 14 launching the lap, trying to be flat in the banking with the cold tyres, which is a little bit risky, and tried to be side-by-side at least into Turn 1 but I was not that close. So after that I tried some different lines – inside, outside – the opposite of Max for the first lap, in case one of the lines was very grippy or much grippier than he is. And yeah, it was close, but not enough.”
How does Alonso rate the job Verstappen is doing? “It is underestimated sometimes what Max is achieving. I think to win in such a dominant matter in any of the professional sports, it is so complicated. So to be at the same level of him, obviously, we have a lot of self-confidence, drivers in general. So I do believe that I can do good as well. I think you need to enter in a mood, in a state that you are, as I said before, connected with a car. I think days like today, I felt that I was at my best and have been giving 100% of what I felt and my abilities in a racing car, but maybe in Spa I was not at that level or in Austria or something like that. So you always feel that there is room to improve and you are not 100% happy with yourself, as I am today. And I think Max is achieving that 100% more often than us at the moment, than any of the drivers, so that’s why he’s dominating.”
The only time Verstappen has had cause to be less than 100% happy with his performance this year was probably at Baku, where Perez beat him. But even that has had its value. “I think I learned a lot from the race in Baku,” he says, “how to do some things with the car, how to set it up. Of course, I didn’t win that race in Baku but actually I really tried a lot of stuff and different tools in the car. That’s why throughout the race it was a little bit inconsistent, but at one point, I got into a good rhythm with what I found. But then I damaged my tyres a bit too much. But it was like ‘OK, that’s quite interesting for the next races’. And I basically implemented that and it has helped me on every track.”
Albon started at the front but slipped back as he stayed on slicks
Bryn Lennon/F1 via Getty Images
The others: McLaren and Mercedes were potentially Aston quick but thwarted themselves. Lewis Hamilton didn’t even make it out of Q2 after poor traffic placement on a quickly drying track ruined his run-plan and left him with overheating tyres and depleted battery when the track was at its driest. Norris qualified a great second, just ahead of Russell. But their teams made disastrous calls for all of them at the first rain shower. They made various recoveries.
Williams over-delivered with a nicely-balanced car which Alex Albon qualified fourth and finished eighth. The Ferrari was an unresponsive beast around this track’s long corners and Carlos Sainz gave it better than it deserved in taking fifth.