John N
Some will tell you Barcelona rarely throws up action-packed races – but Sunday could not have been more of an exception, with battles up and down the order and a race winner who had to grapple with technical gremlins en route to victory. Here are just a few of the numbers it threw up.
- Verstappen’s victory comes six years after his first F1 career win – it was in Barcelona on his Red Bull debut and made him the youngest winner in history.
- It is his 24th win and gives him more victories than girlfriend Kelly’s father, three-time world champion Nelson Piquet.
- Verstappen has won every time he’s seen the chequered flag this season.
- He takes the championship lead for the first time in 2022 – he was 46 points behind Charles Leclerc after the Australian Grand Prix, just three races ago.
- With 2nd place behind his teammate, Sergio Perez ensured Red Bull’s second one-two finish in the last three races on the weekend of Dietrich Mateschitz’s 78th birthday.
- Perez’s first podium finish at this track after 11 previous visits in F1 and four GP2 starts.
- It was also his third P2 finish of the season – as many as he had scored in the rest of his career combined.
- Red Bull lead the constructors’ championship for the first time since before the 2021 British Grand Prix.
- Mercedes’ George Russell (P3) is now the only driver to have scored in every race this season.
- For Russell, it was his second podium of the year and his third career podium after Spa 2021 with Williams and Australia in 2022.
- With P4 for Ferrari, Carlos Sainz achieved his first-ever top-five finish on home soil in Spain, even though he’s scored in all eight starts here.
- With P5 for Mercedes, Lewis Hamilton took his third top-five finish of the season, but it marked the end of his streak of five consecutive race wins in Catalunya.
- At Alfa Romeo, Valtteri Bottas finished P6 for his third top-six finish of the season, although he’s lost two places in the closing laps at the last two races in a row.
- That P6 was the best finish for the Alfa Romeo team on this track for 10 years.
- Esteban Ocon finished P7 for Alpine and has now scored in five of the first six races this season.
- In the sister Alpine, Fernando Alonso was P9 – only his second points finish in his last six starts in his home race (he was also eighth in 2018).
- Despite illness, McLaren’s Lando Norris came home in P8, matching his result in the 2021 Spanish Grand Prix.
- With P10, Yuki Tsunoda scored points for the third time this year, and AlphaTauri has only failed to score once this season (in Miami).
- Following his retirement from the race lead for Ferrari, Charles Leclerc’s longest active finishing streak ended (it was 16 Grands Prix in a row since Hungary 2021).
- Leclerc has been the first retirement in Spain in two of the last three races here.
