Australian Grand Prix 2023

What the heck was that!? Let’s break it down, shall we?

We had 4 red flags: 3 standing starts and a ridiculous amount of DNF’s

To start, Charles put his Ferrari in the gravel on turn 3 of lap 1. Shortly after Alex Albon put his Williams in the wall and George’s Mercedes caught fire.

After a relatively calm few laps, more chaos ensued after K-Mag hit the wall between turns two and three and Max decided his gap up front was getting to be ridiculous and thought taking the red bull off roading would be a nice detour to keep him awake behind the wheel, given he wasn’t required to do a lot of racing at that point.

Sargent wiped out De Vries, Pierre Gasly took out teammate Esteban Ocon and Carlos Sainz wiped out his childhood hero in Fernando Alonso all by turn 4 of the laps 57 restart. This resulted in yet another red flag and the race concluding under safety car, with the grid classification reverting to where things began prior to carnage of the restart, leaving many teams unhappy.

However, two were impacted more than others by the decision to revert the grid back. Haas and Ferrari. Now both teams had already had one driver DNF, being K-Mag and Charles, and before the carnage at least had some hope of salvaging their weekends.

Nico Hulkenberg had managed to put his Haas into P4, however was dropped into seventh upon the reshuffle of the grid and once Carlos has been awarded his penalty for his collision with Alsonso. The team lodged an appeal over the result on the basis that it was a breach of Article 57.3 of the Sporting Regulations, however their pleas were dismissed by the stewards and Hulkenberg’s P7 position upheld. Nevertheless, this is still the best result for the team so far this year.

As for Ferrari, they are lodging their own appeal with the stewards, for the 5 second penalty awarded to Carlos Sainz in the restart, which see’s the Spaniard drop out of the points and into P12, making him the last car to finish that didn’t DNF. No indication as yet about the appeal lodged by Ferrari, but I guess we’ll find out before Baku.

To compound all of this, a fan was struck by debris, from one of the many incidents, fans swarmed the track before the conclusion of the race and Grand Prix itself was summoned to the stewards to explain how and why this was able to happen.

Oh, and let’s not forget, the man in charge of the debacle that was the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix and who gifted Max Verstappen his first world championship, Michael Masi, decided to show his face one again in the F1 paddock. Coincidence, that this race was a disaster? I think not.

So did anything good come out of this race? Well, if you ask Sergio Perez and the boys over in the McLaren camp, yes, yes there was.

Perez managed to comeback 15 places and finish in P5, after crashing out of qualifying in the opening minutes and starting in 20th place.

As for McLaren, well they managed to keep themselves out of the chaos this week and bring it home for a double point finish in rookie Oscar Piastri’s home race. This skyrocketed the team who, as we know, have been struggling for performance all season, from last in the constructors, to 5th position and on 12 points. And what’s more important, they are now 4 points ahead of their main rival from last season, Alpine.

Fingers crossed Baku is a little less eventful off the track.