Paul Ricard gets a bad rap, but the 2021 French Grand Prix helped it recover some of it as a thriller played out between the top two teams in front of Formula 1’s biggest post-pandemic crowd.
All of the talk in the build-up – at least until qualifying – had been about tyre pressures. Flexi wings were less fashionable, but the increased psi and new technical directive about how the tyres should be run was causing plenty of controversy.
If it were to have an impact on the competitive order it was expected to hamper those who were pushing the limits in recent weeks, but Max Verstappen’s pole had thrown that into doubt given he was one of the drivers to suffer a failure in Baku. Red Bull still had serious pace.
