F1 Grand Prix of China

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Yesterday the Grand Prix of China took place with a spectacular race win from Daniel Riccardo followed by Bottas and Raikkonen.
But also an accident with Vettel and Verstappen and a clash with Gasly (who did very good last race) and Hartly.
Today we review this Grand Prix and look into the details.

Info on the Grand Prix

The Grand Prix is held since 2004 at the Shanghai International Circuit.
The track is 5.451 km long with 16 turns
The race consists of 56 laps with the fastest lap (1:32:238) held by
Michael Schumacher.

Practice

The practice was really slippery with spins and off-track trips (into the gravel) everywhere because of the light rainfall in Shanghai
In FP3 Race winner, Daniel Riccardo blew up his engine just 2 hours before qualifying. In those 2 hours, Red Bull did an amazing job by repairing his engine so he could participate (and win) the Grand Prix of China.

Qualifying

During the Qualifying, Pirelli made 3 Tyre compounds available, medium, soft, ultrasoft thereby skipping the supersoft.

Q1
Ricciardo did not start very early in the first session because his engineers were still fixing his engine he broke in FP3.
After 18 minutes Riccardo just gets to Q2 on the edge with a 14th place. The people who didn't go to Q2 were:
Sirotkin
Gasly
Stroll
Leclerc
Ericsson
They started on the back rows

Q2
After 15 minutes this was the people who did not go to Q3
Magnussen
Ocon
Alonso
Vandoorne
Hartley

Q3
With 10 people to go they had 12 minutes to get the best time out of their cars with a maximum of 2 fast laps.
After 10 minutes Raikkonen was the driver with the provisional pole but in the last run of the drivers, Vettel was a fraction of a second (0.087) faster so Vettel did get his 52nd Pole of his career.

The Race

On Sunday the 3rd race of the season took place at Shanghai international circuit With at the front row :

The race started by Vettel with a strong start but also Verstappen had a great start who did go from 5th place to 3rd in one lap and passed Hamilton in just a blink of an eye
After some laps, Vettel created a gap between Bottas and him and Lewis Hamilton (P5 at that moment) could not come closer to Raikkonen (P4) After 18 laps the red bulls dove in the pits to get new sets of medium tires with good teamwork they could pit
short after each other and not create a drama such as last time.
At lap 21 Vettel came out of the pits but Bottas was faster and overtook him. In lap 27 Bottas overtook Raikkonen to get away with the lead but had really lost some time behind Raikkonen.
Lap 33 and this is the moment that changed the whole race: Gasly and Hartly crashed into each other and the incident caused enough debris to let the safety car come out,

Both Red Bulls dove straight into the pit lane to put some new and softer tires on to get more pace on the track therefor the Red Bulls were a lot faster than the other cars. Lap 39 and Verstappen tries to make an overtake on Lewis Hamilton but Hamilton defends and Verstappen ends of track losing 2 places. Riccardo also tried but at a better moment and Riccardo made the move stick so he gets to 3rd place. Lap 43 in turn 15 Verstappen tried to overtake the car of Vettel but they got too close and touch then they spun around.

Costing Vettel places and after the incident, Verstappen got a time penalty of 10 seconds costing him the 4th place and also 2 penalty points on his license. After the clash, Daniel Riccardo overtook Bottas and got to lead the race till the end so Riccardo won and Verstappen on a 5th place.

All with all a good race and a winner who deserves the win, but a ruined race for Verstappen (we are gonna discuss him later)and Vettel same as Hartly and Gasly Hopefully we will see a spectacle the next race as we pass on to Azerbaijan a really tricky circuit with many great things to come!

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