🇧🇷 F1'22 R21: An identically-dressed rival

Interlagos, Brazil, Sao Paulo, whatever you call it, is a proper race track and a proper test of the drivers, with its sweeping left-handers on an undulating anti-clockwise track layout.

And it wasn’t a test every driver was able to pass. McLaren endured a shocking day, with Ricciardo and Norris handing the papaya team their first double DNF since the bad old days of Monaco 2017. When you’re floating around the lower reaches of the Constructors’ Championship, it doesn’t matter so much, but when you’re going for fourth, seeing your immediate rivals get a double-points finish is not where you want to be.

Not that it was as simple as that for Alpine.

The Saturday sprint race brings with it its own set of storylines, and the Alpine drivers ended the 24-lap Saturday event in much worse shape that they started it.

This ruined Alonso’s sprint, and didn’t do much for Ocon either. But if you think that Alpine were going to prioritise the driver who’s staying, think again. As the second safety car restart happened, Ocon’s engineer was maybe a few seconds away from grounding him, taking away his toys and using his full name.

Esteban José Jean-Pierre Ocon-Khelfane, you WILL NOT fight with your brother! as he was attempting to tell him not to fight with the soon-to-be Aston Martin driver.

And with Alonso giving his future employers a preview of what they can expect if they’re not at the front, it’ll be interesting to see how they deal with it with the boss’s son being in the other half of the garage. Especially with his own incidents, cutting across Vettel in the sprint which drew a solitary “ok” from the German in response. To his credit, on Sunday, Lance Stroll at least looked like he was sorry.

Back to Alpine, and they’ve opened a 19-point gap between them and McLaren, which looks very unlikely to be overcome. Both teams are nuking their driver lineups in one weekend and their inter-team relationships have been boiling over for a while - think back to Norris and Ricciardo when Oscar Piastri was announced.

And speaking of inter-team drama, Red Bull’s Max Verstappen put himself into the spotlight by not giving a place back to Checo Perez with the Mexican fighting for second in the Championship. The world champion explained rather cryptically that he wasn’t going to be giving up any places, although he did seem to soften his stance after the race.

Either way, a disappointed Perez and Charles Leclerc are now tied on 290 points, and barring an improbable series of results (Russell win + fastest lap and no points for either driver), it’ll be a straight fight between Perez and Leclerc in Abu Dhabi for second.

And then there are Mercedes, taking their first win of the season. What a weekend for them. A sprint race 1-3, a 1-2, a fastest lap in an avalanche of points. After the Dutch GP, when I was writing these on Wordpress and Revue for some reason (thanks for your continued support here), I asked:

And now that has been answered, with Russell taking his first Grand Prix win a little bit ahead of Hamilton, not that was an engineered outcome with Russell being told that the seven-time world champion was free to try and take the win from him.

This made Russell’s win even more impactful, knowing that Hamilton wasn’t going to be held back behind him, although he never got within DRS range of him, which could have made things a bit interesting.

The inter-team rivalry in F1 is compelling drama - Drive to Survive has shown that - and it’s what fans crave. They want to know the people underneath the helmets, even if sometimes what they find isn’t what they thought. It’s a fight against a mirror while dodging 18 other people looking to take you out - a rival in identical clothing.

For what is a team sport, Formula 1 has a strange dynamic that other sports can’t really compare with. Yes, you earn money for the team through points, and your success is your team’s success, but really your teammate is your greatest test and biggest rival, with normally the same machinery.

There’s just one race to go, with Abu Dhabi hosting the F1 and F2 finales. While most eyes will be on Logan Sargeant, Sergio Perez and Charles Leclerc, there are plenty of internal team dynamics still to sort out. It’s been a long year.