THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S ‘OTHER’ NEXT F1 CHAMPION
All three British drivers competing in the 2021 Formula 1 season made mistakes in the recent Emilia Romagna Grand Prix. All were relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, but only one of them didn’t have major consequences.
Lewis Hamilton’s slip as he lapped George Russell had him stuck in the Tosa gravel for the best part of a minute, and he then limped back to the pits for a new front wing. The combined time loss would have put him a lap behind eventual race winner Max Verstappen, and dropped Hamilton behind Verstappen in the championship standings, had he not been able to gain the lap back and then put in a recovery drive to finish second thanks to Russell’s error.
Just after Hamilton had extricated his W12 from the gravel, Russell’s attempt at passing Valtteri Bottas went spectacularly wrong, with both crashing hard after the Williams driver had put two wheels on a damp patch and spun into his rival for a possible 2022 Black Arrows race seat. Given the public rebuke he received from Mercedes chief Toto Wolff after the incident, Russell’s remonstration with Bottas in the Tamburello gravel was arguably a worse mistake, with the stewards finding that neither he nor the Finn was wholly to blame for the shunt…
The third Mercedes-powered British F1 racer’s mistake might have ruined his weekend but, as it came before the race day chaos at Imola, Lando Norris was able to complete an impressive redemption story.
His error was running fractionally wide – a “couple of centimetres” was Norris’s own assessment – exiting the high-speed left of Piratella on his final Q3 run in qualifying. That tiny misjudgement, coming through a corner where ultra-commitment married to spot-on car placement is needed to carry the greatest speed all the way down
