MEXICO CITY: Red Bull earned themselves one heck of a Formula One fiesta.

Max Verstappen won the Mexico City Grand Prix with a dominant race on Sunday to stretch his season championship lead over Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton. Team-mate Sergio Perez was the first Mexican driver in race history to not just lead the race, but also to earn a podium when he finished third.

And the result pulled Red Bull nearly even with Mercedes in the constructors’ championship worth millions of dollars at the end of season.

While Verstappen and Perez basked in the chants of “Ole! Ole!” from the massive crowd during the podium ceremony and Perez’s father wildly waved the Mexican flag, Hamilton could only watch and listen.

He knows he’s running out of time and races to catch Verstappen in pursuit of a record eighth F1 season title.

Verstappen now leads Hamilton in the championship by 19 points with four races left, starting next week in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Verstappen won in 2019 and likely will be favoured to again.

The two have traded the lead several times this season, and even crashed into each other twice, in F1’s tightest title chase in years.

“Today with their superior speed, if they work to carry that into the next ones, we may be in trouble, or we will be in trouble,” Hamilton said.

Verstappen certainly isn’t taking anything for granted. The 24-year-old Dutchman is chasing his first F1 championship and earned his ninth win of the season, his second in a row and third in Mexico City in four years.

“I don’t believe in momentum,” Verstappen, who took the chequered flag 16.555 seconds clear of Hamilton, said. “Every single race we have to nail the details. ... It’s going to be really tight and exciting through to the end.”

Hamilton and teammate Valtteri Bottas pulled a big surprise in qualifying when the Mercedes cars earned their first front-row lockout of the season. Bottas was on pole to start, Hamilton second and Verstappen and Perez in third and fourth.

Their advantage last only a few seconds.

Verstappen seized the lead into the first corner from third on the grid, going three abreast with the two Mercedes and timing his braking to perfection, in what turned out to be the decisive moment of the race.

“I kept it on the track, came from third to first and that was basically what made my race because I could just focus on myself, and we had incredible pace in the car,” he said.

He then gave Hamilton no chance to hit back once the safety car, deployed after collisions further back, was out of the way.

Hamilton, the most successful driver of all time with 100 career wins, said he gave it everything after being chased closely by Perez over the last 10 laps.

“I feel like I maximised it with what I have,” said the Briton. “We’ve got four races to go and we just have to keep pushing.

The safety car was deployed until lap four after a collision at the start between Haas’ Mick Schumacher and AlphaTauri’s Yuki Tsunoda, while McLaren’s Daniel Ricciardo tagged the back of Valtteri Bottas’s Mercedes and lost his front wing.

Bottas was spun around and dropped to 18th place after an immediate pitstop.

The Finn ended up 15th but pitted for fresh tyres to snatch the fastest lap from Verstappen at the end, denying the Dutchman a precious bonus point without it coming to Mercedes since he was outside the top 10.

AlphaTauri’s Pierre Gasly was fourth with Ferrari duo Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz fifth and sixth to lift the Italian team ahead of McLaren and into third place in the constructors’ standings.

Sebastian Vettel was seventh for Aston Martin, with fellow champions Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso eighth and ninth for Alfa Romeo and Alpine respectively. Lando Norris took the final point for McLaren.

Published in Dawn, November 9th, 2021