2022 Formula 1 Emilia Romagna Grand Prix highlights

Oracle Red Bull Racing showed the true pace of their car in the 2022 Formula 1 Emilia Romagna Grand Prix with a dominant display around the storied Imola circuit resulting in an emotional 1–2 finish for the team’s drivers Max Verstappen and Sergio Pérez.

Starting from pole position after winning Saturday’s qualifying Sprint Race, Verstappen was in imperious form and led from lights and was never headed as he mastered the tricky conditions that transitioned from wet to dry to win by 16.527 seconds. He also claimed the fastest lap of the race for the first time this season to claim maximum points for the weekend.

Pérez was equally impressive as he drove to his second consecutive podium finish in a row, making a brilliant start from third on the grid to pass Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc heading into the first turn and slot into second behind Verstappen. From there, the Mexican drove faultlessly to hold the position all the way to the flag.

After a mechanical issue denied him in Australia, victory in Imola was Verstappen’s second win of the season and helped to move him up to second in the Drivers’ Championship standings behind Leclerc. A mistake on the final lap of the race dropped the Ferrari driver from third to sixth place, allowing Verstappen to close to within 27 points of his rival in the standings. Pérez is five points behind Verstappen in third.

Max Verstappen

To have a weekend like this for both of us with a one-two for the team is just incredible. It was a very lovely Sunday! Everything today was well executed, coming into the weekend I didn’t expect it to be like this. It was more or less a perfect weekend, everything went well for us and we’ll enjoy today. I scored the maximum amount of points this weekend and we can be really proud of that as a team, it’s a great boost. Today was all about judging the conditions, making the right calls and staying very focused, and I think we did that very well. We need to keep focused and we know that at the next race we need to be up there again and keep this going.

Sergio Pérez

It was a tough race, but an enjoyable one. Rule number one in these conditions is to finish. It was difficult because in these conditions it’s easy to make a mistake and put a foot wrong, but we managed a clean race and kept out of trouble, which was pretty important. I got a great start and the restart was good too, then I think the team did a great job with strategy out there. On the intermediates, I was really thinking to save the tyres, but the degradation was high and Charles was really fast towards the end of that stint, so I was happy to just keep him behind. The race was pretty intense with Charles, he was always within an undercut range and when we thought we had him under control he boxed and made things a lot harder for both of us. We were both pushing with cold tyres and, in fairness to Charles, it was easy to make mistakes. We have had such a difficult start to the season with reliability concerns and DNFs, so it was really important we brought it home today – it’s a great result for the team.

Christian Horner – Team Principal & CEO

This has to be one of our best ever results, to take the maximum points across the whole weekend, bar one, was incredible. Both Max and Checo have driven brilliantly to secure our first one-two finish since Malaysia in 2016. I’m very proud of the entire team, from everyone at the track and those back in the factory at Milton Keynes, they delivered a phenomenal performance and it’s just what we needed to rebound from Australia. It’s a long season and we’ll take a lot of confidence from this result and try to build on it in Miami in a couple of weeks’ time.

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