2023 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix - [POST RACE] discussion thread

ROUND 23: Abu Dhabi 🇦🇪

FORMULA 1 ETIHAD AIRWAYS ABU DHABI GRAND PRIX 2023

Circuit stats

First Grand Prix: 2009
Number of laps: 58
Circuit Length: 5.281 km
Race Distance: 306.183 km
Lap record: 1:26.103 Max Verstappen (2021)
2022 winner: Max Verstappen

Track Map

28 comments

Thanks everyone for participating or lurking in our sub this season :)
- Thank YOU for all your work!
- Agreed, this has been a great replacement for reddit's formula1, without all of the "redditness" of it. Thanks for your efforts.
Max casually perfectly parking his car after those donuts lol.
- Unreal car control, those doughnuts were Vettelesque.
The title needs updating :) It says Sao Paolo.
- Ehehe whoops, updated
Strategy for Ferarri comes from the drivers, the strategists and the team principals should take an holiday.
George not knowing Leclerc playing him dirty and thanking him for keeping it clean. Then immediately finding out from Charles that it was in fact very dirty hahahah!

Edit: It's just meant to be funny friends. The irony of George not having heard LeClerc plotting against him and then thanking him. I'm not mad at strategy.
- It was not that dirty. Charles could have blocked him in the apexes of the final 3-4 turns to ensure perez gains 5 seconds on him. What Charles did was more tactical than dirty
- That's not what George said, he said Charles could have backed him up as well as letting Perez past, which would have been dirty. He thanked Charles for not doing that.
Stop blaming Ferrari for sainz's strategy. He was slow today and there was no way he was ending up ahead of hamilton or even in the points. They rolled the dice with best option they had
- Can I blame AR for bottas' strategy? I mean the AR didn't have the speed for points but jfc that one stopper was rough to look at, even if the "sc strat" -brainrot was behind it
  
  Considering tsunoda made the one stop work pretty well, I think that it was worth the risk for AR. They were going to finish well outside the points anyway and went for it.
- The problem was his qualifying yesterday. He would have been in the points if he started near to Charles. Like a lot of teams there were a lot of team mates with big qualifying gaps going on, so something odd happened on Saturday.
Williams finish seventh in the constructor. Let's go.
Why was Hamilton driving into Gasly allowed, while a wheel to wheel battle resulting in touching wheels was punished with 5 seconds for Perez?
- Hamilton and Gasly is pretty clear cut. Gasly locked up and Hamilton couldn't respond in time which is why Hamilton hit Gasly, that's a pretty clear racing incident. Norris and Perez isn't that clear cut.
  
  I can absolutely understanding arguing that it was just a racing incident because Perez didn't expect Norris to turn in and Norris didn't expect Perez to run wide. But at the same time there's an argument to be made that Perez could've turned into the apex but decided to go wide (and watching it back it does seem like he doesn't really commit to the apex which makes him go wide).
  
  The stewards seemed to have gone for the latter explanation and given him a penalty, which seems like a consistent ruling considering Max got the same penalty for a similar situation in Las Vegas (and there Max had a bigger case for it being a racing incident).
- Gasly locked up, if he hadn't Lewis wouldn't have hit him. As Gasly lost control of his car first it's a racing incident. If Gasly hadn't first locked up Lewis would be looking at a penalty.
Now that the season is over, maybe the planet can start recovering from all that gas they burned

28 comments