Simply Abu Dhabi XXXVI

7 2 S I M P LY A B U DH A B I LeClerc completed the podium after being moved onto a two-stop strategy late in the race to fend off the recovering Bottas who stormed from the back of the grid to finish the race fourth for Mercedes. His race was made even tougher after a computer glitch in race control for the first 17 laps shut down the DRS system for all cars. DRS is the mechanism that allows the rear wing to open on the straights to aid in overtaking. Without the relevant accurate and live data for all 20 cars, organisers opted to disable the system entirely until F1’s network was restarted and proved reliable. “The simple part is a data server crashed,” Race director, Michael Masi said afterwards. “The timing still operated fine as we all saw but the data crashed so we immediately disabled it until we were one hundred percent confident that it was all back up and running with the correct data available.” LeClerc managed to hold off Bottas in the closing stages as the Mercedes driver stormed through the field on fresher tyres following a late stop. At one point the Mercedes driver was cutting four seconds out of his gap to the Ferrari but eventually it was too little, too late. Equally Vettel made a late lunge on Alex Albon for fifth place but it proved a disappointing afternoon to cap a difficult season for the four-time world champion as he finished behind LeClerc in the season's standings. Sergio Perez produced one of the drives of the day in his Racing Point to carve through the midfield pack in the closing stages adopting a similar tactic to Bottas by also being on fresh tyres. Having overtaken the McLaren of Carlos Sainz and both Renaults, Perez then denied Sainz’s teammate, rookie Lando Norris of seventh place with an overtake on the last lap. Daniil Kvyat made up late ground on a similar strategy and ended up ninth. The Renault-powered McLarens were in a race-long battle with the factory Renault squad running as a close foursome for the full distance separated by tenths of a second but it was Sainz who took 10th place on the last lap in front of the Renault of Daniel Riccardo and teammate Nico Hulkenberg. Hulkenberg was on for the final points position of 10th but lost two places in quick succession to wrap up his last ever race in Formula One with 12th place. The likeable German doesn’t have a seat for next season and is looking for drives outside of F1 for 2020.