MONACO (AP) — Ferrari doubled its win tally from all last season and Charles Leclerc ended his barren two-year run in Formula 1 with victory from pole position at Sunday’s Monaco Grand Prix.
Eight races into this season, Ferrari and McLaren are looking like they might be able to challenge Red Bull. For F1 fans as a whole it offers hope of more competitive racing.
“It’s exciting and I hope it will be like this for the rest of the season,” Ferrari team principal Frédéric Vasseur said after Sunday’s race. “It will be up and down until the end.”
It wasn’t last season, when Max Verstappen beat his own F1 record with an astounding 19 wins for Red Bull. His teammate Sergio Perez got two victories, and the only non-Red Bull driver to win was Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz Jr.
Leclerc and Sainz have one win each this year and so has McLaren’s Lando Norris. That makes it 5-3 to Red Bull so far — all Verstappen wins — while Leclerc’s Monaco pole on Saturday ended Verstappen’s bid for a record-extending ninth straight pole.
Vasseur feels the momentum could be shifting.
“You have a kind of snowball effect,” Vasseur said. “You have to continue like this.”
Newgarden Goes Back-to-Back at Indianapolis
NDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Josef Newgarden put his cheating scandal behind him to become the first back-to-back winner of the Indianapolis 500 since Helio Castroneves 22 years ago and give Roger Penske a record-extending 20th win in “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing.”
The Tennessean passed Pato O’Ward on the final lap of Sunday’s rain-delayed race to become the first driver to win consecutive 500s since Castroneves did it for Penske in 2001 and 2002. And just like last year, Newgarden stopped his Chevrolet-powered car on the track and climbed through a hole in the fence to celebrate with fans in the grandstands.
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“I love this crowd. I’ve got to always go in the crowd if we win here, I am always doing that,” Newgarden said.
O’Ward slumped his head over his steering wheel in bitter disappointment. He was trying to become the first Mexican in 108 runnings to win the Indy 500.
It looked as if he had been crying when he finally removed his helmet. He finished sixth in his Indy 500 debut, then fourth and then second in 2022 when he was accused of not being aggressive enough to race Marcus Ericsson for the win.