November Rain!

A safety car start, five dnf’s and one dns, five safety car deployments, two long red flag periods and ex Gun’s and Roses guitarist, Slash! The 2016 Brazilian Grand Prix was by far the most memorable and action packed race of the season. Let’s take you through the journey.

The madness began even before the lights went out, as Romain Grosjean careered off in the treacherous conditions. It hardly augured well either when Hamilton, with the relative luxury of setting off behind a safety car at the head of the pack, complained of large drops of water seeping through his visor. The harbingers of a long, exasperating afternoon were all around.

It was a pity for the 60,000 supporters here to salute the farewell of Felipe Massa to see him sadly crash out in his last race in his home country. One of the few memorable pieces of racing they had to cheer came when Verstappen, channelling the audacity that he has shown all season, jumped on Raikkonen within seconds of the restart, sweeping past the Finn into third with exquisite timing.

Alas, not all his colleagues showed the same composure as the rain kept falling. Soon Sauber’s Marcus Ericsson aquaplaned into the barriers, blocking the pit lane. It was all that Verstappen, darting back to his garage, could do to avoid ploughing headlong into the stricken car. Cue the return of the dreaded safety car, which at least did its job until Raikkonen, with a rush of blood when the lights went green again, swerved off, pinballing across the track and scattering debris in his wake.

The only remedy to the chaos was to wave the red flag. For Hamilton, the longer these wearisome delays went on, the better the outlook for Rosberg became. “We should be going now, Charlie,” he muttered in the cockpit, in a barbed message to race director Charlie Whiting.

Instead, as the deluge intensified, the second red flag arrived with grim inevitability. Hamilton was unimpressed, mindful that the possibility of half-points for a truncated race could all but gift the title to Rosberg. “The track is fine,” he ranted at his engineer. “I don’t know why we’re stopping. This is extreme wet conditons, this is normal.”

It was not so long ago that drivers would be forced to tolerate such adversity. James Hunt famously won the championship in 1976 under unremitting downpours at the Fuji Speedway, while Damon Hill prevailed here at Interlagos 20 years ago on a saturated circuit. Whiting, though, was determined to err on the side of caution, keeping the drivers in their holding pen for another half an hour.

Verstappen, naturally, was the one to pounce upon the resumption, sweeping past Rosberg on the outside in a breathtaking move. There had been confidence at Red Bull that they had the pace to run the Mercedes tail car close, and so it proved, with the streaky, fearless young Dutchman executing a masterstroke. In that moment, the equation for Rosberg grew more stressful. He knew that if he dropped one more position, even a second place behind Hamilton in Abu Dhabi would not be enough.