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Spanish Grand Prix
Venue: Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya Dates: 30 May-1 June Race start: 14:00 BST on Sunday
Coverage: Live commentary of practice and qualifying on greatin sports Radio 5 Sports Extra 2 and 3, with race on greatin sports Radio 5 Live; live text updates on greatin sports website and app
McLaren’s Lando Norris claimed his second win of the season at the Monaco Grand Prix, with Charles Leclerc and Oscar Piastri completing the top three.
Red Bull’s four-time world champion Max Verstappen finished fourth.
Last up in this European triple-header is the Spanish Grand Prix, from 30 May-1 June.
Before the race in Barcelona, greatin sports F1 correspondent Andrew Benson answers your latest questions.
Do you think the Monaco Grand Prix would have been any better without the mandatory two-stop rule? – Sukhpal
The new rule introduced for the Monaco Grand Prix this year was a requirement to use three sets of tyres in the race.
The idea was to increase the number of strategic options available, effectively force teams to do two stops and manufacture extra jeopardy.
On that basis, it worked, up to a point.
All weekend, teams were talking about the sheer number of strategic possibilities in the race. And after the race, McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said: “There was a very large variety of scenarios. So in this sense I think it was interesting.”
Whether this made the race better for spectators is a different question.
And while the rule change increased the nervousness and tested the brainpower of the strategy engineers, it made no difference to the result – the only changes in the order of the top 10 were Lewis Hamilton making up his grid penalty and Fernando Alonso retiring.
There is an argument that, in some ways, the rule made the race worse, because it increased the possibility for teams to ‘game’ the result by using their drivers strategically.
Racing Bulls started this, by using Liam Lawson to back up the pack to ensure Isack Hadjar could pit without losing position, before Hadjar returned the favour.
Because they had, Williams then did the same – and then Mercedes.
Some drivers were not comfortable about this.
Williams’ Alex Albon said: “I know we put on a bad show for everyone, and I know we made a few angry drivers behind us in the process as well.
“The two-stop just made us do it twice, rather than once. Just frustrating. Apologies to everyone who watched that. That wasn’t very pretty.”
Their team boss James Vowles even apologised to Mercedes’ Toto Wolff mid-race. Wolff said: “Yeah, I [was] sent a text in the race. He said: ‘I’m sorry. We had no choice given what happened ahead’.
“I answered: ‘We know’.
“He had two cars in the points, and I think that when it started was when the RBs backed us up. So that is what he had to do.”
And then there was the fact that it also made it easier for F1’s controversial red-flag tyre-change rule to be exploited, more of which in the next answer.
The issue at the bottom of all this is the impossibility of overtaking at Monaco, a problem that has existed for about 50 years, as Lando Norris pointed out, and is not solely caused by the size of the current cars, although that has made it even worse.
So, it has to be asked – is it right to introduce such artificial gimmicks to try to fix a problem that is unfixable without track changes? And is Monaco broken, anyway?
As Max Verstappen put it: “Of course I get it, but I don’t think it has worked. You can’t race here anyway, so it doesn’t matter what you do. One stop, 10 stops.
“We were almost doing Mario Kart. Then we have to install bits on the car. Maybe you can throw bananas around. I don’t know. Slippery surface.”
As many drivers were hoping for a red-flag event to provide the opportunity for a ‘free’ stop to change tyres, surely it is time to ban tyre changes (except wet to dry or dry to wet) under red-flag conditions? – Paul
The rule that Red Bull tried to exploit in the Monaco Grand Prix has been around for years, and remains controversial.
Red Bull’s plan was to leave Verstappen out as long as possible, a move which gave him the lead as the McLaren drivers and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc had to pit as part of their own strategic battle not to lose position to each other.
That left the door open to Red Bull to take a risk.
Red Bull knew that if they delayed Verstappen’s stop. and there was a red flag before the end of the race, he would get a free tyre change and win the race, as long as he didn’t lose the lead off the line at the restart.
Race-winner Lando Norris addressed this in rather sardonic style after the race. “What can I do? Nothing,” he said. “It’s out of my control. No real point thinking about it. If it happened, it happened. He wins Monaco, well done.”
This is not the first time this has happened at Monaco.
In 2011, for example, the race was building to an exciting climax, with Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel trying to make a very old set of tyres reach the end, and being chased down by Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso on fresher tyres – and McLaren’s Jenson Button on even fresher ones.
But then there was a crash and a red flag, and all the jeopardy went out of the window.
There were calls then for the rule to be changed. But it’s in place on safety grounds – on the basis that it might be dangerous to leave cars on old tyres after a big crash because the tyres could be damaged and at risk of puncture.
At the moment, there seems no momentum to change it.
Were the team tactics used by Racing Bulls and Williams at Monaco – of one car slowing down to build a gap to allow your team-mate to pit and retain position – because of the two-stop rule, or just because Monaco is so difficult to overtake? Even if the two-stop trial is not continued, might we see this tactic continue in future years? – Chris
This tactic – explored in more detail above – has been used a number of times in the past, and some of those have been at Monaco.
The difficulty of overtaking at Monaco makes its use a slam dunk, because there is literally no chance of the driver doing it being passed.
And the two-stop rule simply meant teams could exploit it more effectively with two cars, because each had two stops to play with – not just one.
If the rule is not changed, it’s hard to imagine that teams would stop using it. Why would they? It banks points.
What has happened to Mercedes’ pace in the past few races? They started the season strong but seem to have fallen back – Kathryn
After a relatively promising start to the season, with four podiums in the first six races for George Russell, and a sprint pole for Kimi Antonelli in Miami, Mercedes have had two difficult races in Imola and Monaco.
Russell qualified well in Imola in third, but fell back with excessive tyre degradation after Mercedes got their set-up wrong.
Wolff said in Monaco about Imola: “We got our car in a completely wrong place. It’s always painful to find out in a post-mortem what you did wrong. But I guess we know that we just really screwed that up, and gave the drivers a car that was very difficult.
“We overheated the tyres, massively, and that’s why we underperformed.”
Monaco was bad luck as much as anything. Antonelli crashed in qualifying. Russell struggled in practice but, after making changes to the car for qualifying, he said it came alive.
He looked quick and likely to challenge for the front two rows of the grid until the electrical problem that caused his engine to cut out after going over a bump in the second part of qualifying.
Wolff said: “We’ve seen, not only with us, but also with Red Bull, Ferrari, you suddenly lose a little bit of your way and you come into some kind of state where you’re not sure anymore whether an upgrade works or whether it’s the ambient conditions that have you over.
“It was always the hot races which were our Achilles’ heel last year. And the cold ones, we dominated. So we will assess. Let’s see how Barcelona goes and the following races.
“Definitely, it’s less of a performance than we had pre-Miami.”
Why potentially drop Imola from the 2026 calendar? It’s far more interesting than most of the other so-called street circuits that look like computer games – Wilfrid
The simple answer is that F1 boss Stefano Domenicali feels 24 races is a maximum beyond which it would be unwise to go, and there is pressure for new races to come on to the calendar.
Thailand is pushing for a race in Bangkok and F1 is keen to have one in Africa, although finding a location there is proving problematic.
In that scenario, it’s hard to justify having two races in one European country, even if it is Italy.
Monza is pretty much sacrosanct as the venue for the Italian Grand Prix, and Imola returned only because of the circumstances of the pandemic in 2020 – and then remained, partly to put pressure on Monza to modernise.
Now it’s Imola that needs to modernise. Its facilities and infrastructure are very antiquated in modern F1 terms, and to bring them up to date would take a lot of money the circuit doesn’t have.
Add all that together and it’s not hard to see why it is considered likely to drop off the calendar.