Luke’s Weekend Take – Abu Dhabi GP 2023

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Final Showdown at Yas Marina: Abu Dhabi GP Wraps Up the 2022 F1 Season with Rookie Highlights and Dramatic FP2

Abu Dhabi 4

It’s the end of the season and we head now to round 2 of the 202 F1 season for the last race where we go back to the Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi. It’s a sad day for all F1 fans as we now know we need to have a few months without any racing, and we all don’t know what to do with ourselves.

It was sunny In FP1, and we see 10 rookies run as part of the FIA regulations where all teams must run a rookie in each of their cars at least once in a season. Most teams left this till the end especially Red Bull who opted to not run any rookie all season and ran both drivers in FP1.

Jack Doohan, one of the rookies had a close moment with Logan Sargeant as the pair nearly came together on the penultimate corner as Doohan was on a flying lap and Logan Sargeant was driving slowly on the racing line, as Doohan comes round the corner he sees Sergeant and goes right to avoid him, however as he is going right, Sergeant seems to have gotten a late message and kinks to the right and nearly went into Doohan going past him. Luckily Doohan’s reflexes are on point, and he was able to go past avoiding any incidents.

Towards the end of the session another rookie also had a bit of a mishap with one of the drivers as Isack Hadjar also finds Lance Stroll on the racing line driving slowly while he was on a fast lap and had to take to the runoff to avoid any contact. It was quite surprising that it was the full-time drivers getting in the way of the rookies rather than the other way around. Other than these 2 close calls the session went without any issues and the rookies gave a good showing of skill as they managed to put in some impressive times and data for their respective teams. At the end of the session George Russell tops the leaderboard followed by Felipe Drugovich and Daniel Ricciardo.

FP2 unfortunately wasn’t as smooth as FP1 as with 8 mins in the session we see Carlos Sainz lose his Ferrari in Turn 3 as he goes over the bumps on the road and complained that he had dirty air from the car ahead of him coming out of the pits. Sainz goes into the barriers quite hard and brings out the Red Flag. The Marshalls and Stewards took some time to clear the track and fix the tech pro barriers as it took them just short of 30 minutes to get the green light again and unlike Qualifying and a Race, the timer doesn’t stop in Free Practice. Once we got going again it was only 150 seconds of running before we saw the 2nd Red Flag of the session. Nico Hulkenberg was seen losing his Haas in Turn 1 and hits the barriers with the back of his car. This time the Red Flag was only for 5 minutes but this meant that we had 40 mins of lost time in the session.

Once the green flag was out again the 3-time world champion, Max Verstappen didn’t want to wait around and was overtaking everyone on the pit lane exit where we see him overtaking both Mercedes drivers, George Russell, and Lewis Hamilton which both weren’t impressed with how Max overtook in the pit lane. Initially I though that this will be investigated by the stewards, however this seems to have been all within the rules and no penalties were given to Verstappen. This incident however has prompted a clarification from the race director for the rest of the weekend stating, “Overtaking is prohibited in the pit exit road unless a car slows with an obvious problem.” At the end of the session, we see Charles Leclerc topping the time sheets followed by Lando Norris and Max Verstappen.

Intense Saturday Showdown at Yas Marina: F1's Final Qualifying of 2023 Delivers Surprises and Sets Stage for Epic Season Finale

We now head into the Saturday sessions starting with FP3 where we had a good session as all teams put their head down to get as much practice time as they could given that in FP2 they lost over 40 minutes of running which is highly critical for the teams to be able to get their setup right for the weekend. Luckily for all the teams, it was a fairly uneventful session, and it was all business as usual with all drivers getting all the data they could get ahead of qualifying. Charles Leclerc does come on the radio to say that the FIA done a good job in Turn 3 to flatten the curve which showed as we had less moments in FP3 which is good news regarding safety. Russell tops the leaderboard once more followed by the McLaren pair Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri.

Heading now into qualifying we see the floodlights on, and the track comes to live in the night sky of Abu Dhabi, I must admit that a track lit up in the night sky looks way better in my opinion. What do you think yourself? When the green light goes on, we see all drivers wait before they go out due to the track ramp up and not wanting to be the first ones to set the laps. When we eventually got going, we see the Red Bull of Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez budge first. We see some track limits on the last turn being enforced as we see Logan Sargeant have 2 lap time deleted while we had Zhou Guanyu and Nico Hulkenberg have one each as well. Unfortunately for Sargeant, his 2 laps deleted meant that he was out in Q1 as he wasn’t able to put an official lap time down, however it is worth noting that both of his deleted laps were quick enough to get him into Q2 so tomorrow he might be one to watch. In Q1 we lose Carlos Sainz, Kevin Magnussen, Valtteri Bottas, Zhou Guanyu and Logan Sargeant as it was a big shock to see Sainz out of Q1 as he has a lot of work to do tomorrow in the race.

In Q2 the shock exits don’t stop as after the first runs our bottom 5 were looking like Daniel Ricciardo, Pierre Gasly, Alex Albon, Esteban Ocon and Nico Hulkenberg with Hamilton in P10 however by the end of the 2nd runs were most cars were out on the brand new softs we see Russell pushes his teammate Lewis Hamilton out in 11th while going 4th himself and we end up losing Lewis Hamilton, Esteban Ocon, Lance Stroll, Alex Albon and Daniel Ricciardo. Hamilton tomorrow will also have some work to do to get a decent finish which will make the battle for 2nd place in the constructors’ championship between Ferrari and Mercedes interesting with 1 of their drivers each starting from the back.

Final chance for the top 10 drivers to get their best starting positions for the race on Sunday. On the first runs we see Verstappen taking provisional pole followed by Norris and Piastri. Can the McLaren pair beat Verstappen and take pole from Max or will his teammate get the pole for the last race in the season. We shall see on the final runs of the final qualifying session of the 2023 F1 season. The 2nd runs went ahead, and we see all the cars queuing in the pit exit to try and get some space on track to have a clean run on track. Norris on his last run was having a great lap but lost the car a couple of times and lost too much time on it. He was extremely lucky that he didn’t lose the car in a part of the track where the barriers are a bit closer as he would have hit them for sure. Perez went P5 in the second runs, but his lap time was deleted for track limits which put him back down to P9. Max couldn’t improve on his final lap, but his first lap was good enough for Pole and he was followed by Charles Leclerc, Oscar Piastri, George Russell, Lando Norris, Yuki Tsunoda, Fernando Alonso, Nico Hulkenberg, Sergio Perez, and Pierre Gasly form the top 10. We hear Christian Horner coming on the radio to Verstappen saying that Max just won him 500 euros as he made a bet with Helmut Marko that Max will be on the front row. We hear Verstappen responding saying “Helmut losing a bet? What world do we live in?”

This grid should give us some good action tomorrow in the race which is all we could ask for as fans. Can anyone take the fight to Max tomorrow, or will he be able to run away with it as we have seen him do for most of the season? We will see tomorrow, and I will see you all in the final Post Race Review for the 2023 season.

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