The Most Interesting Moments of the 2021 F1 Season

Timothy

Hamilton, the only car not to pit to switch to slick tires, duly waited for the lights out on a one-car grid, and away he went. Everyone else merged out behind him from the pit lane, before Hamilton then had to pit for his own slicks and the real action started. First, we got Hamilton versus Schumacher and then Alonso versus Hamilton, the 2005 and 2006 champion defending to secure teammate Esteban Ocon his (and Alpine’s) first win.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, Williams ended up in double-points-paying positions, having not scored a single point for more than two calendar years. George Russell emotionally cried to the media afterward but it was probably his mid-race radio message—”If you need to compromise my race to help Nicky [Latifi] then do it, I will box early to avoid the undercut for anyone else”—that showed how much it meant.

For a guy whose future at Mercedes was all but confirmed, Russell didn’t have to care that much about dragging his backmarker team into the points again. But as a lifelong Williams fan, it showed just how much every team member has to pull through to make it work.

The less said about Sebastian Vettel getting disqualified, sadly, the better.

A Mexican F1 Driver Leads in Mexico for the First Time 

The Mexican Grand Prix was very exciting for several reasons: firstly, Red Bull looked so scarily dominant it seemed the title had swung one way. Also, it was Sergio Perez’s first home race in a top team.

The Red Bull driver had already survived the second seat’s curse but also went on to become the first Mexican driver to lead the Mexican Grand Prix, in what would be one of several crucial times he held the lead from Hamilton during the pit stop window. Perez finished third but there’s no question that, to a home crowd in Mexico City, he might as well have won the title.

Leclerc and Sainz Make Ferrari Likeable, Successful Again

“What’s going on with Ferrari?” is a sort of permanent philosophical fixture to the F1 landscape. When it’s winning you have to ask it, when it’s losing you have to ask it more often, and at the start of the 2021 season it was looming large over the red garage. After all, even their former driver hated them so much he didn’t want to see the logo.

In 2020, Ferrari was terrible. In 2021 Ferrari was occasionally terrible but in fun and exciting ways, like crashing your way to take pole in Monaco and chaotically backsliding through the French Grand Prix for no reason. Truly, you did not know what it was going to do next, and at points, it seemed like it didn’t, either.

The fight between Red Bull and Mercedes meant Ferrari could get on with whatever it was doing. We don’t need to know the inner workings, but it worked. What had looked like erratic performance at the start of 2021 turned into a consistent drubbing at McLaren’s cost, its early-season advantage seemingly nixed after the Monza win. 

In 2020, Ferrari scored a miserable 131 points and came a disastrous sixth. In 2021 it scored 323.5, beating McLaren for third by nearly 50 points. That’s a hell of a turnaround—and it was Sainz, the best-adapted of all the drivers to swap teams for this season, who brought home the biggest chunk of that, beating Leclerc and former teammate Norris to fifth with an Abu Dhabi podium. 

It’s good for F1 when Ferrari is competitive; it’s the most historic team and an enormous marketing asset. And after 22 long, hard-fought races this year, we could all do with a bit of scarlet levity heading into the next one. Prance on, ponies.

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