1. Max is crowned king of the world - after a fraught wait
After 21 races spanning nine months comprising one of the closest, fiercest and most emotional world championship contests ever seen in the history of Formula 1, it all came down to one final race. It felt like the eyes of the entire world were on the starting grid at Yas Marina, to a degree that no one could ever recall happening before. Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton were level on points, but the tie break of the number of wins in 2021 meant that Verstappen would win if that was still the case at the end of the evening. Simply put, Hamilton had to win if he wanted to secure a record eighth title, while Verstappen had only slightly more leeway if he was to achieve his life's ambition of a maiden championship.
Unlike the previous weekend in Saudi Arabia, Verstappen made no mistakes in qualifying and emerged with a pole position that left Mercedes slightly reeling. But Hamilton regrouped and beat Verstappen off the grid at the start of the race, only to then find himself forced wide and off track by Verstappen at turn 6. He came back on and was allowed to keep the lead - to howls of complaint from Red Bull - and from that point on it became clear that the Mercedes was significantly quicker and had the race in the bag, despite some sterling rear gunner defence from Sergio Perez during the first round of pit stops. With the laps counting down to the finish, even Red Bull boss Christian Horner conceded that it would take a miracle to change the outcome now.
The miracle came in the form of a safety car following Nicholas Latifi's crash with five laps to go. Race control scrambled to get the race restarted in time, rather than have the season end in a disappointing parade across the line, but this led to some controversial decisions to speed things up. Hamilton couldn't pit for fresh tyres without conceding the lead on track to Verstappen, so Verstappen took the chance instead to come in for new softs. When lapped traffic was cleared out of the way and the race restarted with the pair side-by-side with one lap to go, Hamilton was a sitting duck on an old set of hards and could do nothing as Verstappen sailed past for victory in both the race and the championship. Mercedes protested what had happened but no one had the appetite to rewrite the brilliant, thrilling on-track spectacle and so the result stood. However the reverberations and recriminations of what happened that night will likely last a lot longer!
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