Max Verstappen has controversially beat Lewis Hamilton at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix to win his first ever drivers championship. The final race of the season lived up to it’s pre-race expectations, it was an exhilarating final race which will surely be remembered for years to come.
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Max Verstappen started the race on pole with Lewis qualifying in 2nd place, however it was the Brit that lead most of the race after a fantastic start. The first incident between the pair didn’t take long to arrive as in the first few laps Max Verstappen forced Lewis Hamiton outside of the track only for Hamilton to regain his position at 1st from outside. The first debatable decision of the race went to Lewis, as no investigations on the incident happened.
Throughout the race Lewis seemed faster than Max, but what helped Max were outside forces such as his teammate Sergio Perez and later on Nicolas Latifi. Perez helped Max massively, by going to the pits late and slowing Lewis down after the Briton’s and Max’s pitstop. This helped Max come only 1.8 seconds away from Hamilton, but the Mercedes was still too fast.
In the last few laps of the race when everyone thought Lewis Hamilton seemed uncatchable, a Nicolas Latifi crash forced the safety car to be deployed. This led to Verstappen going into the pits for a third time, switching his hard tires to the faster soft ones all whilst Lewis had to stay with his nearly 40 lap old tires. After the FIA controversially let all the overlapped cars between Lewis and Max pass the safety car, Max Verstappen edged out Lewis Hamilton in the final lap of the race securing his first ever driver’s championship.
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