Red Bull’s triple world champion Max Verstappen won the first sprint race of the Formula One season at the Chinese Grand Prix on Saturday. Verstappen beat Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton by 13.043 seconds in the 19-lap race at the Shanghai International Circuit to extend his championship lead over teammate Sergio Perez, who finished third.
Verstappen passed Hamilton on the ninth of 19 laps and then stretched out his lead to continue his F1 dominancein all formats. Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz finished fourth and fifth.
“The first few laps were quite hectic,” Verstappen said. “Once I got in the lead the car was handling pretty well.”
The 26-year-old will be the favourite to win the Chinese Grand Prix on Sunday, the fifth race of the season, after winning three of the first four GP races this year. Verstappen has also finished first in 22 of the last 26 races.
Lando Norris of McLaren and Hamilton started on the front row in the Shanghai Sprint, with Fernando Alonso of Aston Martin and Verstappen on the second row.
The sprint – the first of six that F1 will run this season – is about one-third the distance of a full race. The winner gets eight points with seven for second, six for third and so forth.
Verstappen earned eight points for victory in the Chinese sprint to climb to 85 points in the driver standings, while Perez added six to stay in second place on 70 points.
Second place was like a consolation victory for Hamilton as the seven-time champion has not been a major factor for several seasons. His last GP win was in 2021 in Saudi Arabia in the second-last race of the season.
“I forgot what he felt like to be out ahead,” Hamilton said. “It felt good for the short while that I had it. I was grateful for the moment.”
The sprint race on Saturday was run on a dry track, unlike the wet and slippery qualifying session on Friday. Verstappen likened the sprint qualifying on Friday to “driving on ice”, when the Dutch driver was among several drivers who ran off the track in a chaotic, wet session exacerbated by the track itself.
The track is the great unknown going into the first Formula 1 race in China in five years. The circuit has had a thin “seal coating” applied, described as liquid asphalt. F1 tire supplier Pirelli said it was not fully aware of the changes heading into the race.
Two small grass fires broke out on at the edge of the track in Friday practice. The circuit was built on a marshy area, and a methane gas leak in suspected.