Chapter 345: Chapter 171: The Imola Grand Prix Begins
By then the car will definitely be out of control.
Despite no pre-race communication, the small cooperation between Qin Miao and Hamilton directly blocked Perez’s excellent starting advantage.
At this point, someone might say, isn’t there still space on the other side for Verstappen to overtake from the right side?
But you should know, Qin Miao is currently side by side with Hamilton, and although it seems there’s a car’s width of space on the outside for Verstappen to squeeze in.
But if Verstappen really inserted himself into this seemingly available gap, at the combination of turns T2 and T3, Verstappen would surely suffer a major loss.
Because as soon as Qin Miao brakes a little late entering the turn, Verstappen would have to either take the escape route onto the grass or get bounced off by the yellow speed bump at the apex.
Verstappen is aware of this as well, so upon seeing the arrangement made by Qin Miao and Hamilton, he knows that his chance to gain position at the best overtaking turn, T2, has already slipped away. Although it’s somewhat regrettable, the race is still long and Verstappen can stabilize his mentality, not eager at this moment.
Instead, Verstappen sets his sights on his teammate Perez.
He needs to secure a relatively good position before the official attack begins to quickly overtake Qin Miao to start his offensive against Hamilton.
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In the subsequent T2, T3, T4, Qin Miao didn’t cause any trouble, nor did he deliberately let Hamilton pass. The two cars were side by side all the way until exiting turn T4. Because the angle at which Qin Miao exited the turn wasn’t as good as Hamilton’s, Hamilton quickly widened the distance between him and Qin Miao after exiting the turn.
Then Qin Miao was stunned.
When he was side by side with Hamilton just now, it wasn’t so bad. Even though there were raindrops on Qin Miao’s helmet visor, they didn’t really affect him.
Moreover, Qin Miao’s visor has a hydrophobic layer, so water marks don’t stay on it.
But now, following behind Hamilton’s car, the spray raised by high-speed driving directly turned Qin Miao’s vision into a white blur, with only the scenery on both sides of the track and the tail lights at the rear of Hamilton’s car providing Qin Miao some reference points.
Realizing he couldn’t see the road ahead, Qin Miao instinctively let go of the throttle with his right foot.
As anyone would think, when suddenly unable to see what’s ahead at high speed, the first reaction would be to ease off the throttle and brake to secure one’s own safety.
But as a professional racing driver, Qin Miao pushed the throttle back down.
Fortunately, this was during the gear shift interval, the slight easing of the throttle didn’t affect his speed much, and Verstappen behind him couldn’t launch an attack on Qin Miao in the next turn.
On this Imola circuit, the only place suitable for attacks in rainy conditions is T2.
But after stepping on the throttle, watching Hamilton’s red tail lights flicker in the white mist ahead, Qin Miao genuinely felt his scalp tingle.
With the rain, many of the braking points Qin Miao had identified became unusable, and he could only determine the braking timing by using the scenery around the track as a reference. Because of insufficient grip, Qin Miao’s braking points had to move back, and he also had to find reference objects to judge his current location.
Despite a short moment of panic and losing rhythm, Qin Miao quickly stabilized his mentality.
After all, he’s quite familiar with this circuit; even if the scenery in front of him is completely obscured by the rain curtain raised by Hamilton’s car, Qin Miao can still maneuver normally relying on his familiarity with the track.
As the race continued to T11, what comforted Qin Miao was the fact that it was still raining, with water everywhere on the track. Aside from Hamilton, Verstappen following him couldn’t see the road ahead either, and Qin Miao couldn’t even see where Verstappen was in the spray raised by his own rear wheels.
But before Qin Miao could relax a bit, a yellow flag appeared on the track.
When the director switched the camera over, the audience saw that on the straight between T15 and T16, a Williams car had already crashed its front wing and right front suspension, parked on the grass at the edge of the track.
Of course, it’s our great director Latifi who made the mistake.
Because Latifi crashed so close to the track without a safety zone exit, after a brief yellow flag, the race officials converted it to a safety car.
During the safety car period, the race officials also played back what happened in the short time of less than half a lap.
Actually, before the accident, Latifi had already spun off the track once at T13, and when he returned, he happened to be ahead of Mazepin.
The key issue was that Mazepin was driving normally, while Latifi didn’t see the car behind and forced a line change, leaving Mazepin no extra space to evade.
Then Latifi’s right rear wheel collided with Mazepin’s left front wheel, disrupting Latifi’s car balance, causing it to lose control and crash into the guardrail.
The primary cause of this accident was Latifi, there’s no arguing about it.
For the drivers, however, there’s some good news, because the safety car guiding them will drain much of the water from the track.