Sainz has had a ridiculous past couple of months. First, he found out that he had lost his Ferrari drive to Lewis Hamilton for 2025, then he missed the Saudi Arabian GP thanks to appendicitis, and now he has won on his first Formula 1 race back.
Sainz is the only non-Red Bull driver to have won a GP since November 2022. He’s also proved to be a strong team-mate to Max Verstappen, Lando Norris and Charles Leclerc in his F1 career so far. It’s surely only a matter of time before he finds employment in 2025. As Alex Kalinauckas argues in his column, the Spaniard would be an asset to any team on the grid.
Aside from Sainz’s personal story, the Ferrari success in Melbourne was a feel-good result for F1 after two dominant Verstappen drives. The reigning world champion was hamstrung from the start but, as Jake Boxall-Legge shows in our report, free practice form and the struggles of Sergio Perez suggest that there could have been a good Ferrari-Red Bull fight without the brake conflagration that took Verstappen out of the equation.
Even if Ferrari can maintain its challenge – which we’ll dive into in greater depth in next week’s issue – expect normal service to be resumed in Japan. The RB20 is likely to fly around Suzuka, a track on which Verstappen has been mighty in recent years.
Elsewhere in this issue, Joey Barnes reports from the novel non-championship IndyCar event at The Thermal Club and Lewis Duncan describes the dramatic events of MotoGP’s visit to Portugal.
The UK motorsport season is now really kicking into gear. We preview another competitive season in British GT and GB3, which both begin at Oulton Park, and cover last weekend’s club-racing action in our bumper 21-page National section.
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