Chapter 1064: Chapter 408: Sainz’s Lifelong Rival

At the same time, because a car stopped behind, all the cars needed to go through another warm-up lap.

When starting again, there weren’t as many incidents on the track.

But for some reason, Alonso didn’t come back out after returning to the pits, likely planning to give up on this race.

Zhou Guanyu started directly from the pits. For a race that can be finished without a pit stop, and with a total length of only 100 kilometers, Zhou’s starting position tomorrow is already set at the back of the grid.

Once all the cars were in position, the five red lights lit up, and the race began!

In fact, at this point, Qin Miao’s race was effectively over, because Qin Miao was using medium tires for this race.

Plus, due to Toto’s strategy of saving more resources for next year’s car development, Qin Miao and Hamilton were bound to adopt a relatively conservative pace at the start and during the race.

After all, the most likely time and place for accidents in an F1 Grand Prix is during the start.

However, the two Ferraris in front had rekindled their long-lost internal rivalry.

During the start, although Leclerc’s speed wasn’t as quick as Verstappen’s, his starting position was better, so right after the start, he guided his car to hug the inside line with the hope of braking late to overtake Verstappen on the inside.

After all, there’s no significant difference between the straight-line speeds of the Ferrari and Red Bull cars, and the inside line of T1 is also the inside line of T3. As long as he can secure the inside line from Verstappen and not get shaken off by him, there’s a good chance he’ll take the lead at T3.

But Pan’s defensive skills are not to be underestimated, so when he saw Leclerc making a move he shouldn’t have, Verstappen staunchly defended the inside line.

This forced Leclerc to approach the corner at a very narrow angle.

At this point, Leclerc’s front wing was level with Verstappen. If Verstappen didn’t move to the outside line for the corner, Leclerc would have been boxed in by Verstappen.

It could be said that Leclerc was caught in a dilemma.

As a result, when Leclerc reached T1, he had to brake early.

Consequently, Perez, who didn’t have a start as good as Leclerc’s, managed to take advantage and gain ground on the outside at T1, while Qin Miao’s conservative start was comparable to Sainz’s.

Moreover, due to the performance disadvantage of his car, by the time they reached T1, Sainz was already half a car length ahead of Qin Miao.

With opportunities ahead and no pressure from behind, Sainz relied on faster cornering speed and angle to overtake his teammate Leclerc on the outside.

Apart from the position swap between the two Ferrari drivers during the starting phase, there were no other changes among the top four drivers.

However, when the race reached T4, Leclerc took advantage of Sainz’s attempt to attack Verstappen at T3, resulting in a slow exit speed, to reclaim his position. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

Qin Miao, watching from behind the two, found it exhilarating, almost wishing he could egg them on to start fighting.

But the two remained restrained, so after Leclerc overtook Sainz, Sainz did not make any further moves.

Having regained his original position, Leclerc quickly widened the time gap between himself and Sainz.

For Qin Miao, the rest of the race was relatively uneventful. Given the inherent performance gap of the car and the team’s decision not to have Qin Miao switch to soft tires to attack the cars ahead, Qin Miao maintained a steady cruise 1.4 seconds behind Sainz.

Of course, although the team said he couldn’t take risks, Qin Miao himself certainly wanted a better starting position for tomorrow, so while trailing Sainz, Qin Miao applied a negative buff to Sainz.

[Flood Beast (gold): Lock onto a driver ahead, continuously applying pressure to them, where the pressure applied does not decrease and will increase with lap time and the number of probing attacks until the driver ahead is overtaken or makes a mistake due to excessive pressure.

The level of pressure increase is determined by the opponent’s mentality attributes, and the pressure value for the target driver is visible.]

[Sainz’s current pressure level: 34%]

There was pressure, but clearly not much.

Having raced so many times, Qin Miao’s attempts to attack Sainz were not few. Humans are remarkably adaptive creatures, so over many races, Sainz grew accustomed to Qin Miao’s attack rhythm, as expected.

However, as always, in front of Qin Miao’s system, these things are just fluff.

As Qin Miao’s skill was applied, Sainz’s pressure visibly increased.

However, the rate at which Sainz’s pressure level increased wasn’t particularly fast.

Qin Miao quickly realized that the likely reason for this was the distance between him and Sainz wasn’t close enough, hence the pressure wasn’t sufficient.

After some thought, Qin Miao began to utilize his tires more, increasing his lap speed by about 0.2 seconds since his medium tires had plenty of life left to finish the race, allowing him to burn them as needed.

Consequently, Qin Miao’s speed increased significantly, bringing him directly into the DRS zone behind Sainz.