ABU DHABI 2021

Lap 57. Yas Marina Circuit. December 12, 2021.

The Safety Car is coming in at the end of the lap. Lewis Hamilton leads on hard tyres that have been on his car since lap 14.[22] Max Verstappen sits behind him on soft tyres fitted minutes earlier, under the Safety Car.[3] Fifty-seven laps of the final round are gone. One remains. It decides the championship.

The track goes green.

They arrive in Abu Dhabi level. Both on 369.5 points.[3][17] No two title rivals had entered a final round level on points since 1974.[3] Hamilton is a seven-time World Champion.[17] A win on Sunday makes it eight. Verstappen has never won one.

They have history. Major contact at Silverstone and Monza, lesser contact at Imola and, one week earlier, in Jeddah.[17] Hamilton won that Saudi Arabian race, and the two left it tied at the top of the standings.[17]

The mathematics for the finale are simple. Whoever scores more points is champion. If they finish level, the title is Verstappen’s on wins — nine to Hamilton’s eight.[3][18] It is the thirtieth time the Drivers’ Championship has come down to the final round, and the first since 2016.[3]

Saturday belongs to Verstappen. Pole position, 1:22.109, with Hamilton second at almost four tenths.[21] Red Bull engineers the lap: Pérez runs ahead of his teammate in the final session and gives him a slipstream.[3] The lap comes on soft tyres, and the rules lock Verstappen into starting the race on them. Hamilton qualifies on mediums — slower over one lap, kinder over a stint.[3]

The race starts at 17:00 on Sunday, in front of 153,000 people.[3] Lights out. Hamilton beats Verstappen off the line and leads into Turn 1.[3][20] Verstappen stays close, and at the Turn 6 left-hander he lunges down the inside. Hamilton, forced toward the edge of the circuit, cuts across the run-off and keeps the lead.[3][20] Red Bull wants the place handed back. The stewards look at the data and decide no investigation is necessary.[3]

Then the tyres start talking. Hamilton’s mediums hold their pace; Verstappen’s softs suffer the greater degradation, and the gap grows.[3] Red Bull moves first: lap 13, Verstappen in for hards — the undercut.[22][20] Mercedes covers it one lap later.[22][3] The stop that follows is not the threat. Sergio Pérez is. Left out front on worn tyres, the second Red Bull is told by radio to hold Hamilton up, and he holds him for two laps. An eleven-second lead all but disappears.[3] Hamilton clears him and rebuilds the gap to four seconds by half distance.[3]

On lap 26, Kimi Räikkönen’s brakes fail and put him in the barrier at Turn 6. The 2007 World Champion’s 349th Grand Prix, his last, ends there.[3]

Lap 35. Antonio Giovinazzi’s Alfa Romeo rolls to a stop beside the track, and the virtual safety car hands Red Bull a cheap stop.[3] Verstappen takes fresh hards on lap 36.[22] Mercedes leaves Hamilton out rather than surrender track position.[3][20] Verstappen rejoins seventeen seconds back. He closes to eleven, and no further.[3][20] On pace alone, the race is over.

Then Nicholas Latifi crashes.

Lap 53. Latifi, his tyres dirty after running off circuit while racing for fifteenth place, puts his Williams into the barrier at Turn 14.[3] The Safety Car is deployed. Five laps remain.

Verstappen pits for soft tyres and keeps second place.[3][22] Hamilton cannot answer. Pitting from the lead hands the lead away, and Mercedes reads the situation as a race that may never restart.[3][20] Pérez, his Red Bull ailing, retires to the pits behind the Safety Car.[3]

Five lapped cars sit between Hamilton and Verstappen.[3][1] Race control’s first message says the lapped cars will not be permitted to overtake.[3][20] Red Bull’s pit wall lobbies Race Director Michael Masi by radio to clear them.[3] On lap 57, the message changes. Only the five cars between the leaders are waved past the Safety Car. The three lapped cars behind Verstappen stay in line.[3][2][1] Race control then calls the Safety Car in at the end of that same lap, not the lap after. One racing lap remains.[3][2]

The Safety Car peels into the pit lane. Green.

Verstappen follows Hamilton through the first sector, close enough to strike. At Turn 5 he lunges down the inside. The fresh softs grip. The hards, on the car for forty-three laps, do not.[20][3] Hamilton attacks back on the two straights that follow. Verstappen covers both.[20]

He crosses the line 2.256 seconds clear.[18] Max Verstappen wins the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix and, for the first time, the World Drivers’ Championship.[3][18] Behind the fight, Carlos Sainz brings his Ferrari home third, five seconds back. Yuki Tsunoda takes a career-best fourth.[3][18]

The reaction starts before the podium. On the last lap, in a radio message never played on the world feed, Hamilton tells his engineer the race has been manipulated.[3] Toto Wolff appeals to Masi over the radio to reinstate the lap-57 order; Masi answers that this is a motor race.[3] Lando Norris, one of the five drivers waved past, says afterward that the restart call was made for television. Daniel Ricciardo, the first car not released, says he is speechless.[3]

Mercedes protests twice that evening: once claiming Verstappen overtook under the Safety Car, once against the lapped-car procedure under Article 48.12.[1][3] The stewards dismiss both the same night, ruling that the Race Director held overriding authority over the Safety Car.[2][1] Mercedes signals an appeal, then withdraws it.[3]

In March 2022, the FIA publishes the findings of its inquiry. Race control, it concludes, did not handle the late Safety Car period fully in accordance with the regulations; the rules themselves were ambiguous; Masi had acted in good faith. The results stand.[19][3][17]

By then Masi is gone from the role. On 17 February 2022, the FIA restructures race control, removes him as Race Director, and appoints Niels Wittich and Eduardo Freitas to alternate in the job.[16][3] Team radio to the race director disappears from the broadcast, and the Safety Car procedure is rewritten: from 2022, the car withdraws one lap after the unlap instruction is given.[3]

The margin is eight points.[3] Andrew Benson of the BBC concluded, after the FIA’s report, that if every lapped car had been released as the regulation described, the race would never have restarted — and Hamilton, not Verstappen, would have left Abu Dhabi as champion.[3]

The rulebook changed. The result did not.[19]