How Did I Become an F1 Driver?

On lap 4, Qin Miao took advantage of the moment to get past Norris, who’d just been overtaken by Alonso and had lost his rhythm a bit, moving himself up to ninth.

Zhou Guanyu, meanwhile, was opening up the gap to Qin Miao, because he was busy defending from Ricardo behind him.

The two drivers’ lap times today were actually pretty similar, but the problem was that Zhou Guanyu couldn’t shake Ricardo out of his DRS window before DRS was enabled, letting Ricardo stay within DRS range behind him the whole time, which dropped him into Ricardo’s quagmire.

As for the top three, their positions still hadn’t changed.

However, Hamilton had gotten into Verstappen’s slipstream, while Perez, once DRS was activated, had already been dropped by 1.7 seconds by the pair, and as time went on, that gap kept widening.

Just like at the end of the 2021 season, Perez couldn’t actually offer Verstappen that much on-track support; most of his impact was still on the strategic side.

On lap 5, Qin Miao overtook O’Kang on the main straight, and on lap 6 he passed Bottas to move up to seventh.

But on lap 7, Qin Miao got stuck behind Brother Tou.

You really have to say, it’s worthy of the old man who wrote the Hamilton Defense Overview, huh?

In terms of defending, Brother Tou really does have a couple of tricks up his sleeve.

With Qin Miao’s car almost out of electrical energy after he’d pulled off two overtakes in two laps, Brother Tou quite effortlessly locked him down out on track.

Of course, this didn’t last long—once Qin Miao realized that without ERS, even with slipstream and DRS it was very hard to get past Alonso, he switched over to recharging his battery.

As the race reached lap 10, with a fully charged battery, Qin Miao came down the main straight, dumped everything—slipstream, DRS, and ERS—hit a top speed of 369 km/h, and just blew past Brother Tou on the straight.

The commentators at the track all sucked in a sharp breath at that.

Because ever since the start of the ground-effect era, F1 cars’ top speeds haven’t been particularly high.

Thanks to porpoising, if a car’s top speed is too high, porpoising is guaranteed to happen, no matter how exquisite your aero design is.

But today was special: the Rodriguez Brothers Circuit is at high altitude, the air is thin, Mercedes’ car in its current trim is more of a low-drag muscle car, Qin Miao had another car ahead giving him reduced drag, and more importantly, the wind was blowing along the main straight.

You could say that under these track conditions, Qin Miao cashed in on every possible boost, and in the end put up a top speed that F1 cars in this era basically aren’t supposed to be able to reach.

As expected, with such a ridiculous top speed, Qin Miao also took the fastest lap of the race.

But after getting past Brother Tou, Qin Miao found himself a bit annoyed, because now up in sixth, Leclerc ahead of him was already 6 seconds up the road.

The main thing was that Qin Miao had been tangled up with Brother Tou for too long; Brother Tou had been driving defensive lines most of the time, which naturally hurt his own lap times, and the gap between Brother Tou and Leclerc had just been stretched endlessly.

This is also the downside of being penalized to start at the back of the grid; many times, even if you’ve shaken off the slower cars behind you, by the time you get back into clean air, the drivers who weren’t originally as fast as you have already opened up a big gap while you were stuck fighting the backmarkers.

By lap 19, Qin Miao had cut the gap to Leclerc down to 2 seconds.

Nine laps to gain only 4 seconds on Leclerc doesn’t sound like much, but if you calculate it carefully, it means Qin Miao’s car was a solid 0.4 seconds per lap faster than Leclerc’s, and the Rodriguez Brothers Circuit in Mexico isn’t a very long track, so Qin Miao’s pace was actually very strong.

And you have to remember, Leclerc was on softs at this point, while Qin Miao on mediums was able to reel him in that quickly, which already proves how fast he was.

But for Qin Miao, there was another piece of bad news.

Leclerc was 4 seconds behind Sainz ahead, and Sainz was 11 seconds behind Perez in front of him—and this was only lap 19 of the race.

The positions of the two Ferrari drivers on track could best be described as stuck in the middle of nowhere, with no one in front and no one behind.

No matter how fast Qin Miao was, at most he’d probably only be able to catch up to the back of Perez later in this race; even trying to challenge Perez for position would be difficult.

But this was something the team had already calculated before the start, and Qin Miao had mentally prepared himself for it before the race as well.

If there was no safety car in this race, there was no way Qin Miao was getting onto the podium.

On lap 20, Qin Miao entered the DRS zone behind Leclerc.

Without even taking a moment to sit in Leclerc’s wake, as soon as he hit the DRS zone on the main straight on lap 20, Qin Miao went for it in one go and overtook Leclerc directly.

Leclerc didn’t put up a fight.

Even though after 20 laps Leclerc’s softs hadn’t dropped off a cliff yet, their grip was already worse than Qin Miao’s mediums. At this point, never mind whether he could actually hold off Qin Miao’s attack—just defending against Qin Miao would burn through a ton of his own tire life. Leclerc very sensibly decided there was no need to mess up his own race rhythm just to defend against Qin Miao.