“It’s a moment to go from champions to donkeys”. The phrase is by Valentino Rossi and dates back to 2009, when he slipped at Indianapolis leaving the victory in the hands of Jorge Lorenzo, and fits perfectly with what was experienced in the exciting qualifications of Jeddah. As stated in La Gazzetta dello Sport, “History now repeats itself with Max Verstappen, the young Red Bull phenomenon who is fighting for the title against His Majesty Lewis Hamilton, in one of the most exciting and uncertain Formula 1 World Championships of all time”.
Max was flying, risking to crash twice in the previous 26 corners of his lap on a track that, at least in qualifying, impressed the drivers and spectators. But then, “Bam! Business went up in smoke. Pole position was won by Hamilton, infallible as usual, and it is no coincidence that the British Mercedes champion is at 103. No one like him knows how to make a difference when it counts. It was a hard lesson for Max, passed in a second from the top to the flop, and a blow to his father Jos, who slammed his fists on the table watching the incident on the monitors in the pits. Verstappen got out of the car and walked back to the garage. While Hamilton was already stopped in the pit lane and breathed a sigh of relief ”.
It’s a World Cup “always poised between ecstasy and despair“ as the Corriere della Sera. “Verstappen’s bumper car is very painful: he throws himself off at the last corner of the last lap. It looked like Senna until a moment before, a ferocious dance among 6 kilometers of low walls in this Arab madness that is not Monte Carlo, it is much more dangerous. Nothing is done, but the damage to the championship risks being irreparable. He already had the best time in hand, but continued to force into a competitive trance. Perhaps there is a technical reason behind it, Red Bull’s choice of extreme set-ups, “unloaded”, to compensate for the increased speed of the Mercedes. But the fault remains with the man, or rather with the boy: it is a mistake so that the difference between Lewis’s 103 pole and Max’s 12 emerges. The experience is not invented, Hamilton took the unexpected gift by inviting him to the party Bottas is also in the front row “.
At the decisive moment, it then resurfaced “The dormant, polite, perhaps suffocated intemperance of the terrible boy who was Verstappen and who perhaps still is, at 24, sends not everything, but a lot, to the air” comments The Republic. “It pushes where it is no longer needed. Sin of vanity, recklessness, dizziness on the stomach-turning carousel of the Jeddah circuit that hides traffic jams and traps in its fast and blind curves “.
It could be the decisive mistake that still directs the World Cup towards Sir Lewis, but history (and even more than this World Cup) it teaches us that everything can be overturned again, much sooner than expected. And to close our story he thinks again, Valentino Rossi. After the defeat of Indianapolis, “He showed up in his Misano with a donkey drawn on his helmet, admirable self-irony, and triumphed by demolishing Lorenzo and Pedrosa. Indy’s wound hadn’t killed him, but made him stronger “. Let’s see if this evening will already be the same for “Super / Mad” Max.
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