How Did I Become an F1 Driver?

Besides Qin Miao, another Chinese driver, Zhou Guanyu, also adopted a one-stop strategy using yellow and red tires to complete the race.

However, compared to Qin Miao, Zhou Guanyu’s pace on the medium tires dropped significantly in the later stages.

Moreover, during Zhou Guanyu’s tire change, Alfa Romeo’s tire change crew maintained stable performance, but a 4.5-second tire change directly placed Zhou Guanyu behind Albon when exiting the pit lane.

If the straight-line speed of this season’s Mercedes cars often made slower teams feel desperate as they couldn’t catch up,

then the Williams cars this season made teams with faster lap speeds but slower straight-line speeds feel extremely frustrated.

Albon often relied on his car’s straight-line speed to form a long DRS train behind him. Due to the muscle car characteristics, even if the trailing drivers had DRS, their top speed at the end of the straight wasn’t as fast as the Williams cars.

So, after reaching this position, unless Zhou Guanyu capitalizes on an error from Albon to overtake him, he’ll definitely be stuck in this position, completely losing the chance to score points.

After Qin Miao exited the pit lane, he returned to his fourth position, with a 13-second gap to third-placed Perez.

With soft tires against Perez’s medium tires, there’s no doubt Qin Miao has a definite speed advantage.

The only question now is whether Qin Miao can catch up to Perez in the remaining 16 laps and secure a podium finish.

As for second and first?

The gap between Perez and Hamilton is currently 12 seconds, and Qin Miao doesn’t think he has the ability to attack Hamilton after overtaking Perez.

Not to mention, after switching to hard tires, the gap between Hamilton and Verstappen has gradually increased to 5 seconds now.

In the later stages of the race, apart from the occasional broadcast shots of Zhou Guanyu, the main coverage focused on Qin Miao.

The video also showed the time gap between Qin Miao and Perez, as well as the remaining lap times.

Qin Miao, of course, is significantly reducing the time gap to Perez with each lap.

On average, Qin Miao can reduce the time gap to Perez by 0.8 seconds per lap.

However, this 0.8-second chase speed seems a lot, but in the face of the remaining 16 laps and a 13-second gap, it’s still somewhat insufficient.

The punishment of dropping 10 positions has completely ruined Qin Miao’s chance of getting a podium in this race.

On the track, the French tradition brought some interest and suspense to the otherwise somewhat dull latter half of the race.

In the 61st lap, O’Kang activated DRS on the main straight to overtake his teammate Alonso. After overtaking Alonso, O’Kang quickly cut in front of Alonso like a lion, completely ignoring Ricardo, who was already stuck on Alonso’s inside line.

With his teammate blocking in front and Ricardo on the side, all the optimal entry angles for Alonso were sealed during corner entry.

This directly caused Alonso to lose two positions; O’Kang overtook, and Ricardo overtook as well.

This scene greatly shocked the Spaniards, sharply challenging Alonso’s worldview.

Damn, the French can play like this!

No wonder they surrendered so decisively back then; it’s a genetic trait!

Hitting their own people hard, while flattering outsiders to the extreme.

Alonso also remarked on the team radio: "Beautiful! What a wonderful season! Absolutely wonderful!"

Then in the 62nd lap, Ricardo also overtook O’Kang.

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Although it’s not quite a case of evil people being punished by evil, some of O’Kang’s actions this season do leave people scratching their heads.

Although Qin Miao’s initial evasive and defensive maneuvers were in vain — the two Alpine drivers didn’t start infighting at the beginning of the race — given the recent on-track status of the two Alpine drivers, internal conflict in the French team, though late, has arrived.

However, Qin Miao’s strategy on the track wasn’t problematic at all, considering that sometimes a lot of preparation is to avoid that one percent chance of an accident.

In the race, just when one wave settles, another arises.

In the 65th lap, Alonso, who was in 9th place, had to retire due to an engine failure.

Alonso was furious after his retirement; not only did his teammate annoy him on the track, but the damn Alpine car’s reliability was again poor. A precious scoring opportunity was gone just like that.

At this moment, Alonso genuinely felt like he was going to explode with anger.

After getting out of the car, he punched hard, as if his fist was landing on his teammate O’Kang’s head — or perhaps the head of Alpine’s team leader, Safnuer.

And the only consolation for Alonso now is that after this season, he’ll be leaving Alpine for Aston Martin.

Vettel tuned Martin’s car for a year, and it’s believed that by then, Aston Martin’s car will surely have a certain level of competitiveness.