Despite scoring the first double of the course at the premiere of the Formula 1 World Cup, Red Bull played with the rest of the grid in Bahrain, where he dedicated himself to temporizing and reserving the mechanics of his two cars for future eventualities. This Sunday, in the second stop of the calendar that was held in Jeddah, the different circumstances that coincided generated the situation that led the energetic cars to unlock their full potential and race without reservations. And the stopwatch confirmed the predictions for the preseason: the car of the current world champions is more than a second ahead of the rest of the peloton. Within this framework and if politics did not have weight, something unthinkable in any workshop, also in that of the red buffalo brand, the title should be played between Max Verstappen and Checo Pérez, the couple from the Milton Keynes team (Great Brittany). However, the compass that Red Bull gave the Dutchman from the first moment leaves the Mexican wrong, who lives in the permanent need to demonstrate the type of driver he is.
In Saudi Arabia, the Jalisco rider kept an eye on the rear-view mirror at all times, waiting for the moment when his neighbor in the workshop would get behind him despite having started 15th. That happened right in the middle of the race (lap 25 of 50), which was when the technicians of the Austrian company trembled, who attended with their hair standing on end at the pulse for the championship lead that their riders maintained. Verstappen’s voracity led him to look for one last dizzying turn that gave him the fastest lap of the race and the extra point that this implies and, consequently, allows the current champion to stay at the top of the points table.
If Pérez dared to challenge Mad Max On the trip that led him to add the fifth victory of his career, the third position that Fernando Alonso occupied when he crossed the finish line made it clear that the Aston Martin is the second best prototype today, even if things went wrong for him. later to the troop of Silverstone (Great Britain). The Spaniard managed to repeat the result of two weeks ago and to correct a mistake he very rarely makes, placing himself wrong on the grid and receiving a five-second penalty for it. The management that he made of such a delicate situation, without panicking, should have led the Asturian to add the 100th podium of his record and the second in a row, something that he had not achieved since 2013, when he competed in the overalls of Ferrari. However, a second blunder from the British formation – the mechanics touched the car in the tire change operation before completing those five seconds – meant another ten seconds for the two-time world champion with Renault (2005 and 2006), which they added to his final time, and that they finally relocated him to fourth. Carlos Sainz, for his part, finished sixth, penalized for the appearance of the ‘safety’ at the worst moment for the ‘Scuderia’.
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