Episode 20
Canadian Grand Prix Review || F1 2023
Welcome back to The Steward's Office. This week, F1 visited one of my favourite circuits as they headed to the Canadian Grand Prix. I'm chatting about that messy Friday, the wet Saturday and all the action that happened on track on Sunday including Alex Albon's brilliant drive and that intense battle between Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso. So, get ready because you're been summoned to The Steward's Office.
Transcript
00:05:07 Checo Perez was having a bit of a difficult FP2 session as well. He was just struggling to get in a fast lap, a sort of quali simulation. He just could have put the lab together. I think at one point when he was going for a fast lap, he ended up clipping a wall, which was just a nightmare. So he was having a little bit of a struggle.
::00:05:46 It was very heart in mouth moment because I was just thinking someone's going to end up going into a wall because that track is so, so slippery. Normally, I don't mind the rain. I quite like when we have wet qualis and wet races, but the way the rain was coming down at this point, it just looked unsafe.
:: :: :: :: :: :: ::00:09:07 But we did get a really interesting battle for P1 between Verstappen and Alonso. The Aston Martin upgrades really seem to be working for Alonso and him and Verstappen were basically seemingly swapping P1, every other lap.
:: :: :: :: :: ::00:12:12 Alex Albon though was just setting such amazing lap times. He was in P1 coming out of Q2, which was amazing for him. Amazing for the Williams and a testimony to their upgrades and to the tyre strategy during quali. Don't get me wrong, I don't think they had bang on the pace to get P1 and, you know, they didn't get pole, so they didn't have the best pace the world, but their strategy obviously paid off for them. And the upgrades were working to an extent that they were able to set some good lap times in.
:: :: :: :: :: ::00:15:15 And then we had another red flag as Oscar Piastri ended up spinning and hitting a wall. But just before we saw the red flag come out, Nico Hulkenberg managed to cross the line and take P2. He managed to bump Fernando Alonso from P2 into P3 and Lewis Hamilton went into P4 because of that lap.
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