Only now managed to build the telemetry:
Race gap:
Of course congratulations RedBull, not a mistake and a bit of luck which we'll see later. From this gap a few things are really obvious:
* LEC was a lot faster until lap 15, in fact almost 0.6s per lap faster.
* PER was slowing down VER a bit, and SAI went long in the swimming pool chicane at lap 7 I think which lost him 1s and he slowly rebuilt that lead.
* PER built his victory on lap 16 (inl)-17(outl)-18 with 1.48.1, 1.32.1, 1.25.2 (285.4s) against LEC 1.32.1, 1.31.4, 1.50.8 (294.3s), where he basically gained almost full 10s on LEC, had LEC stopped 1 lap earlier we would be talking about a different race but SAI was meant to cover and he refused.
* SAI losing that 1s on lap 7 will end up being one critical piece of the loss
* The ALO train was pretty embarassing and IMHO the reason why this track shouldn't be around any more. ALO was 4s a lap slower than the top teams and 3s slower than Lando or Russell, in no race you should be allowed to be 4s slower per lap and maintain your place for more than a handful of laps.
* NOR was on an absolute hunt, his last few laps were unreal compared to the rest of the grid, however even he had to surrender to this track unable to pass Russell, despite the clear pace advantage.
Now... Everyone knows Ferrari messed up calling LEC in for pitting with SAI already there however 2 things happened that you all already know about, SAI and LAT:
You can probably tell where the pass happened, just to compare how much slower he was, here's SAI v SAI in following laps:
Granted he isn't really 5.8s slower due to LAT, but he's definitely losing more than 2 seconds. The big correction at the end of the SAI lap is when he attempted to pass PER but almost lost it, huge correction.
And the second thing that happened is LEC v ALB:
You can tell that LEC was behind ALB because S2 and S3 are basically the same times, LEC was trying to pass in whatever way, going further along, braking later but it's just too hard here. So this lap was instrumental in allowing VER to gain significant time to LEC which eventually meant that LEC was too close to VER and with the strategy mistake of calling in LEC, VER was able to pass LEC. By my count Albon was shown almost 20 blue flags and he ignored each one of them.
https://streamja.com/P5bk5
Congratulations to RedBull for the victory, sad day for Ferrari fans like me, but I think the strategy issue, while obviously there, isn't the main protagonist in what happened in the end... Can't catch a beak...