Leclerc did a mistake at the last chicane on lap 36 so he lost his 2.5 second cushion. So he then had Verstappen between 1.01 and 1.5 seconds until the end of the race. "Managing"...oh brother. He was flat out trying to hold that DRS line above 1 second.LM10 wrote: ↑27 Jul 2025, 23:04Laps 39-43 of Piastri:AR3-GP wrote: ↑27 Jul 2025, 21:59Is he going to ignore that Piastri suddenly showed a lot more speed in the last 5 laps? Everything that we can see shows evidence that Piastri was playing into the gap he had to Norris more than anything, only going as fast as necessary since he wasn't sure if the tires would make it. He had pace in hand.
1:46.498
1:46.326
1:46.144
1:45.933
1:45.706
Laps 39-43 of Leclerc:
1:46.194
1:46.174
1:46.184
1:46.315
1:46.580
Both were managing, as well as all other medium runners because anything else would have been foolish.
Sometimes a picture can show you a trend that you can't see staring at text. You can see that bad lap, and then the push (and loss of the tires) afterwards. Meanwhile Piastri was showing us that he was playing with Norris, ramping up the pace and setting a PB on the penultimate lap. That really says it all. Also pay attention to the pace of #4 on the C1 tire on a 25C (cold) track. This tire was brought here to be so slow that no one would use it. He 1+ seconds faster per lap. No other car would even grip the track with a C1 tire on a cold day like today. Wake up guys.
