Chapter 1420 - 534: Time to Counterattack

Chapter 1420: Chapter 534: Time to Counterattack

At this point the gap between Verstappen and Alonso had already been stretched to 1.8 seconds.

And the gap between Qin Miao and Verstappen had grown to 2.7 seconds.

To be honest, sometimes Qin Miao also felt that the performance gap between the Mercedes and Red Bull cars versus the midfield pack was a bit too big.

It’s only been a few laps since the race started, and the gaps are already this large.

After completing the overtake on the Young Master, Qin Miao began steadily closing the gap to Alonso.

Qin Miao only caught up to Alonso at the end of lap 12.

Qin Miao was well aware of Alonso’s defensive ability; in fact not just Alonso—once an F1 driver is a certain age, their defensive craft is rarely weak.

After all, defending against the car behind is more about experience than pure technique most of the time.

So Qin Miao knew Alonso wasn’t as easy to handle as Stroll; if he wanted to pass Alonso, he had to use the speed advantage from DRS in the DRS zones.

In the face of an absolute speed difference, even if Alonso wanted to resist Qin Miao, there was nothing he could really do.

Meanwhile, on lap 13, Hamilton, who had been fending off attacks from Verstappen behind him, finally couldn’t withstand the pressure Verstappen was applying.

He was taken in the DRS zone that lap by Verstappen.

Nothing to be done—this season the overall pace of the Red Bull is simply faster than the Mercedes, and on top of that the Red Bull’s DRS efficiency is terrifying.

Plus Albert Park has added an extra DRS zone in the second sector, so Verstappen could catch Hamilton even more quickly.

So seeing Hamilton taken wasn’t really a surprise.

On Qin Miao’s side, he completed the overtake on Alonso in the DRS zone of the second sector on lap 14.

Alonso also knew Qin Miao had spent a long time saving his tyres and ERS energy for this attack. The old man’s thinking for today’s race was very clear: just run his own race, bring home the position and points that belong to him, and that’s enough. As for fighting with Qin Miao and that group—there was no need.

Anyway, no matter how hard he tried, there was no way he could actually hold off Qin Miao’s attack.

So Brother Tou showed no intention of defending against Qin Miao’s move and simply let Qin Miao go.

"I have to say, Alonso’s approach is very smart. He knows he’s not a match for Qin Miao, so he just lets Qin Miao through. It’s a win–win: on one hand he doesn’t delay Qin Miao’s chase, and on the other he preserves his own tyres," Bing commented when he saw this.

After passing Alonso, Qin Miao was nominally up to third place, on the podium, but in reality the gap to second-place Hamilton was already 5 seconds, and he was 6.6 seconds behind race leader Verstappen.

This pit stop mistake had cost far too much time.

And as the race went on, the gap between Qin Miao and Hamilton was being stretched by around 0.05 seconds per lap.

As for Verstappen?

The gap between the two of them was growing by 0.2 seconds per lap.

Even so, despite how grim the situation looked, both Qin Miao and the Mercedes pit wall were still relatively calm and composed about what was happening on track.

At this moment Frankie also cut in on the team radio to Qin Miao at just the right time: "OK, Qin Miao, the pace of our car is very good right now, please keep it up. From here on the cars ahead are very unlikely to pit again for fresh tyres, so protect your own tyres and wait for our moment to counterattack."

Qin Miao’s reply was very brief: "Copy, I’ll do my best."

In the following phase, as Frankie had said, Qin Miao began to look after his tyres. But even while doing that, his lap times compared to Verstappen and Hamilton weren’t much slower; whenever the two of them made small mistakes, Qin Miao could even be slightly quicker.

You could say that in tyre-management mode, Qin Miao’s lap-time consistency was the best among all active drivers.

But overall, Qin Miao was still gradually being dropped by them.

Strictly speaking, Qin Miao’s long-run pace at this point was already enough to match Hamilton’s, but because he had to manage his tyres, what we saw on track was his lap times being just a touch slower than Hamilton’s.

In the next part of the race, the director still occasionally cut to shots of Qin Miao, Hamilton, and Verstappen.

But the three of them were all focused on running their own rhythm and had no intention of making a move, so in the director’s mind their importance dropped sharply.

The live broadcast cameras were now trained on Perez further back on the circuit.

After all, at this stage Perez was the only one slicing through the field, carving up the cars ahead.

Many veteran fans, however, knew very well that the truly exciting part of this race hadn’t even started yet.

Of course, before that, the Mercedes strategy group held a brief "meeting."

It couldn’t really be called a formal meeting—they just huddled together to discuss a bit.

And what they discussed was that once Qin Miao’s tyre advantage in the latter part of the race fully came into play, he would inevitably catch Hamilton. When that happened, should Hamilton give up the position to Qin Miao.

After all, everyone knew Qin Miao’s traits.

And at this point, any intra-team fighting wouldn’t benefit either of the Mercedes drivers.