Good job Max, inching closer to actually keeping the WDC.
* Rough race for Ferrari, wasn't looking too bad at the start, for the first time since Imola Ferrari had a great start, probably thanks to the new clutch.
* Despite what everyone was adamant about on tire degradation from FP2, Ferrari had pretty good tire life, in fact people are even questioning whether Sainz should have pitted at lap 42, with 24 laps old Mediums that would have needed to last till 34 to reach the end, with some visible blistering on the front tires.
* On the other hand Gasly managed to get to the end of the race, albeit he was lapping 2s/lap slower than Sainz.
* Leclerc made a mistake in Turn 10, at crashed out at lap 18 after a tough first part of the race, and being able to open a gap of just about 2 seconds right around lap 16.
Sadly there's no telemetry for lap 18 on LEC so I can't quite show a graph to validate what happened, however Charles admitted to it being his mistake, probably under pressure to push as hard as he could to make up for Verstappen undercut.
* Looking at these lap times it's easy to see that all the tire degradation problems that everyone was talking about on Ferrari didn't actually exist. Ferrari just had the engine tuned down in FP2.
* It easier to see here also that Gasly got to the end with no pits, but was a lot slower than Sainz, so hard to use it as a direct comparison, but clearly someone did get to the end, and perhaps Ferrari could have dared a bit more here, they would have gotten lucky with the VSC if nothing else, plus they had Sainz sit behind Perez for so long, if they wanted to pit anyway they could have done it earlier, but ultimately nothing would have changed in that case. Sainz himself mentioned that he asked the team to let him finish the overtake and then he would have pitted.
Lap 11 was probably the best chance for VER to pass LEC:
* He had a HUGE speed advantage on that lap, 29kph between DRS and tow in the back straight, 32kph at T1, but Ferrari was just stronger in S3 all race (LEC first, SAI later) and was able to keep him far enough that it never mattered.
* And on the straight without DRS into T10 his top speed advantage was just 8kph, not enough to be able to pass, compounded with the need to brake much earlier due to being so close to the car in front that it compromises his downforce.
As soon as LEC got out of DRS range:
* That top speed gap became more reasonable at 11kph with just the tow, and looking at the performance of the car in the corners, those tires were still very alive, compared to the Red Bull.
Sadly Ferrari today was again the better car, but when it's not reliability, it's driver errors or strategy calls although today with the forced pit by the SC everyone pit at the same time.
Checo and Russell had an eventful VSC ending at lap 50:
Russell created a big gap in front of him in the back straight, created enough margin that when the restart came he was able to go quickly, about 27kph faster than Perez who instead was still braking when Russell had the throttle down.
Nothing Perez he could have done there at that point, I think Perez managed his VSC badly.
I think the championship gets really hard now, everything can still happen especially with the TD change in Belgium but as a Ferrari fan I do feel it's probably slipping away.
cheers