Dutch driver Max Verstappen (Red Bull) won the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix this Sunday, taking his 19th victory in the 22nd and final race of the season, in which Mercedes finished second in the Constructors’ Championship.
Verstappen crossed the target in 1:27.02.624 hours, leaving Monegasque Charles Leclerc (Ferrari) in second place with a time of 17.993 seconds and Briton George Russell (Mercedes) in third with a time of 20.328.
On the track, Mexican Sergio Perez crossed the line second, but the Red Bull driver received a five-second penalty for a collision when he overtook Briton Lando Norris (McLaren).
Leclerc even let the Mexican pass in an attempt to force Russell to lose more than five seconds and avoid the Mercedes driver’s podium, but the strategy did not work and Mercedes even secured second place among constructors, worth several million euros more. the end of the year.
Thanks to Russell’s third place and Hamilton’s ninth, the German team beat the Italians, who had completely misunderstood the strategy of Spaniard Carlos Sainz. The Madrid native was forced to stay on the hard tires for almost the entire race and was called to the pits two laps before a mandatory change and dropped to 18th place.
With this result, he was also overtaken in the World Drivers’ Championship by his compatriot Fernando Alonso (Aston Martin), who, thanks to seventh place in Sunday’s race, finished the championship in fourth, with the same 206 points as Charles Leclerc. , winning the number of podiums compared to the Monegasques.
Lando Norris was sixth with 205 points, five more than Sainz, who finishes the year seventh after spending most of the season ahead of his teammate.
Dutchman Max Verstappen once again proved immune to all the drama, taking his 19th victory of the season out of a possible 22, adding to his record for victories in the same season.
With this Sunday’s victory, Verstappen, who was already a three-time champion before this race, stands out as the third most victorious of all time with 54 triumphs, one more than German Sebastian Vettel. He is 37 behind the second, that is, Michael Schumacher (91), and 49 behind the record holder Lewis Hamilton (103).
Verstappen’s dominance this year is evident in the number of laps completed. In the championship there were 1003 of them out of 1325, that is, 75.7% of the total number of laps were completed. In percentage terms, only Jim Clark, who led 71.47% of the 708 laps in the 1963 championship, came close (he led 506). In absolute terms, second place is occupied by Sebastian Vettel, who scored 739 points out of 1133 in 2011.
The championship ends with Verstappen champion with 575 points (he added an extra point for the fastest lap this Sunday), Sergio Perez in second with 285 and Lewis Hamilton in third with 234.
In the constructors’ competition, Red Bull won with 860 points, more than double the score of second-place Mercedes with 409 points. Ferrari was third with 406 points.