Max Verstappen was closing in on Carlos Sainz after making his second pit stop at the 2022 Formula 1 Canadian Grand Prix, but Yuki Tsunoda’s crash caused the safety car to go out with 21 laps to go in the race. This opened a window for the Spaniard to come in to change his compounds, and he started just behind the Dutchman on five laps fresher tyres, so he would have the opportunity to attack him when racing speed was restored.
When the Safety Car returned to the pitlane, Sainz got in the Red Bull’s wake, and increased the pressure he was exerting with the DRS until he was four tenths behind. However, the reigning world champion held on to cross the finish line a second ahead of the man from Madrid, thus achieving his sixth victory of the year and widening his lead in the world championship to 46 points over his teammate, Sergio Pérez.
After the race we learned that Verstappen suffered a radio failure just before the restart after the safety car, so the Austrian wall could not hear his driver, although they could send him instructions through the track engineer , Gianpero Lambiase .
“It didn’t work anymore, he decided to stop,” said the Dutchman. “I have no idea when it stopped, but at one point [Gianpiero Lambiase] told me it wasn’t working, I think it was before the start.”
“I guess it had to work before, or it wasn’t going anymore, but it didn’t matter anymore! As long as I can hear it, that’s the most important thing,” said Max Verstappen after his 26th Formula 1 win.
Red Bull chief executive Christian Horner noted that the radio went “very quiet” before the team realized they couldn’t hear their driver: “There were only one-way messages from GP to Max [Verstappen], only with spaces but without anything coming from the car”.
“Turns out the radio wasn’t working, or he could hear us but we couldn’t hear him,” Horner acknowledged.
Verstappen was in control of much of the grand prix, and in the opening moments, his team decided to send him to the pits when the virtual safety car came out after Sergio Pérez retired, betting on a two-stop strategy. The Dutchman revealed that he was not sure he could catch Sainz, and that he entered the pitlane as a reaction to the Safety Car for Yuki Tsunoda’s crash.
“I wasn’t sure if I had closed that gap until the end of the race,” said Verstappen. “Then the safety car came out, and I wasn’t too happy with it, because I knew he [Sainz] would have fresh tires behind me, plus he had a bit more pace, it was impossible to defend.
However, Horner said that “all the metrics they had showed he would have caught up and passed him with 10 laps to go.” That’s how Verstappen lived it: “The last 15 or 16 laps we were going flat out, going to the limit, and I knew, of course, that I couldn’t make a mistake.”
“It was a good race, it’s always good to be able to push in a Formula 1 car instead of just saving the tyres,” said the Dutch Red Bull driver.
