Verstappen beats Hamilton’s winning rate with Imola victory · RaceFans

Max Verstappen’s Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix victory over Lando Norris was the closest finish to a race for more than two years.

Norris was 0.725 seconds behind Verstappen when he took the chequered flag last weekend. While Lewis Hamilton finished 0.179s behind the Red Bull driver in Australia last year, that race ended under Safety Car conditions. For the last green-flag finish closer than that you have to go back to Verstappen’s victory over Charles Leclerc at Jeddah in 2022, when the pair were separated by just 0.549s.

Verstappen’s third consecutive victory at Imola was the 59th of his career. He has therefore scored as many grand prix wins as the first five Formula 1 world champions combined: Giuseppe Farina (five), Juan Manuel Fangio (24), Alberto Ascari (13), Mike Hawthorn (three) and Jack Brabham (14).

With 59 wins from 192 starts, Verstappen’s winning rate now stands at 30.7%. For the first time in his career his rate is better than that of Hamilton, who has gone over two years since his last win, and has taken victory in 30.4% of his 339 starts:

Verstappen’s victory came from his eighth consecutive pole position. That equalled Ayrton Senna’s record run:

It was also Verstappen’s seventh consecutive pole position since the start of the season. That equalled another record, set by Alain Prost in 1993:

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This was also Verstappen’s 10th consecutive front row start. However he has much further to go to equal that record – Senna managed 24 in a row spanning the 1988 and 1989 seasons.

Red Bull picked up another win and scored points with both cars at Imola. However they were out-scored by McLaren, who took 30 points to their 29.

Leclerc’s third place for Ferrari was their first rostrum finish at the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix (first held in 2020) and first at Imola since 2006 when Michael Schumacher won the San Marino Grand Prix. Carlos Sainz Jnr became the first Ferrari driver to lead a lap of a grand prix at Imola since Schumacher’s win in the same race.

Mercedes marked their 300th grand prix as a constructor. Of those, 12 came with their original team in the fifties and the remaining 288 since 2010. They had little to celebrate at Imola, though George Russell took the seventh fastest lap of his career, matching the tally of Jacques Laffite.

Their customer team Williams also had little to shout about. This was the 10th consecutive race in which they failed to score. However rivals Sauber are in a worse position: They’ve now gone 12 races without taking a point, including last year when they competed as Alfa Romeo.

Finally, Oliver Bearman has now scored as many points in Formula 2 as he has in Formula 1. He picked up six on his debut for Ferrari at Jeddah, where he forfeited all points-scoring opportunities in the two F2 races, including the two he should have had for his pole position. At Imola, where Bearman returned to drive for Haas in practice, he led Sunday’s F2 feature race early on but stalled twice at his pit stop and added nothing to his tally of six points from six races.

Over to you

Have you spotted any other interesting stats and facts from the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix? Share them in the comments.

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