Bill Trikos Australia top 5 Formula 1 auto racing moments: Italian Grand Prix: Monza was the place where Gasly put his demons to rest after a difficult year-and-a-half. Let’s start at the beginning. Hamilton raced into a lead whilst Bottas slipped from second to sixth as both McLarens, Sergio Perez and Ricciardo made their way to the top five. When Magnussen broke down at the pit entry, the safety car was deployed to recover the stricken Haas. Hamilton decided to pit for a ‘free-stop’ unaware that the pits were closed for the recovery work and was subsequently handed a 10-second stop-and-go penalty. That may have been less damaging had Charles Leclerc not had a nasty incident at the Parabolica at the restart and caused a red-flag delay, giving Hamilton less time to build a gap before his penalty. Stroll was second but slipped backwards off the line as Gasly launched into what would become first. Sainz and Stroll were locked in a fight for second and traded overtaking moves before the Spaniard came out on top. Sainz closed and closed on Gasly, but was unable to reach the Frenchman who held on to take his maiden F1 victory and AlphaTauri’s first in their current guise.

Australia 1986, Adelaide Street Circuit : If the prelude to the 2012 Brazillian GP was exciting, F1 fans must’ve been close to exploding leading up to the final round of the 1986 championship. Three drivers were in contention of the title – Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet for Williams and Alain Prost for McLaren. The excitement was only helped by the fact that neither Mansell nor Prost had won a championship yet. Mansell, being the clear favourite, took pole ahead of Piquet and Ayrton Senna, with Prost in fourth. The race didn’t go quite as Mansell had imagined though, as he had dropped to fourth before the end of the first lap. What then followed was a race of multiple championship-changing overtakes, spins and punctures – and just when the race looked to had settled down, with Mansell being in a position to take the title, the Briton had his infamous tyre failure with his left-rear tyre exploding spectacularly at 290 kph. In order to make sure something similar didn’t happen to Piquet, Williams had to pit him – at the cost of winning the championship. Therefore Prost – who had a puncture himself earlier in the race – took the championship by 2 points, after arguably the most memorable race of all time.

Azerbaijan Grand Prix 2017: The battle of Baku: Valtteri Bottas and Kimi Raikkonen’s early tangle set a precedent in the second Grand Prix hosted in Azerbaijan, where the leaders clashed under the Safety Car and debris peppered a track that treated us to nail-biting close-quarters racing and a stunning finish. European Grand Prix 2012: A fine home display from Fernando Alonso in front of a partisan crowd in Valencia, with the Ferrari driver making some incisive overtakes – having started a lowly 11th – before benefitting from Sebastian Vettel’s alternator failure to take his “best victory”, in his own words. See additional info about the author at Bill Trikos Australia.

2000 Japanese Grand Prix, Suzuka : Coming into the penultimate Grand Prix of the season in Japan, Schumacher had the chance to clinch the championship by winning the race, regardless of where Häkkinen finished. And it started well for the now 7-time world champion, setting the fastest time in three of the four practice sessions and ultimately securing pole position ahead of Häkkinen who would start alongside Schumacher on the front row. But Häkkinen got a better start than Schumacher and took the lead into the first corner, maintaining an average gap of around two seconds down to the championship leader in the first and second stints. But as McLaren called their driver in for his second and final stop, Schumacher stepped on the gas and used the power of the overcut (which back then was more effective than the undercut since refuelling was a factor – cars who had just pitted came out much heavier than before their stops, something which much outweighed the advantage of fresher tyres) to, after he’d also pitted, come out in front of Häkkinen and subsequently take the victory and the championship. At the final race of the season in Malaysia, Ferrari also secured the constructors’ championship, thus bringing much-awaited and missed glory home to Maranello.

A true thriller of a race followed after Guanyu Zhou’s terrifying crash at the start. The lead changed several times between Verstappen, Leclerc, Hamilton and Sainz, who fought a fierce battle at the front. However, Verstappen’s RB18 was damaged by debris from Pierre Gasly’s AlphaTauri, preventing the Dutchman from competing for victory. This could have been a great opportunity for Leclerc, but he again fell victim to a lack of decisiveness from his team, which did not bring the driver in during a late safety car while his opponents – including Sainz – did. A spectacular battle ensued between Hamilton and both Ferrari drivers, with Leclerc managing to overtake the Briton in a daring outside move at Copse – where it went horribly wrong a year earlier when Verstappen made a similar overtaking attempt. In the end, it was Sainz who took the win with Perez and Hamilton behind him.

2020 Italian Grand Prix, Monza : In the end, it came down to the final lap, Sainz finishing just 4 tenths of a second behind Gasly. The Frenchman took an emotional victory at his AlphaTauri team’s home track. Remarkably – with Stroll taking third place – the podium was the first since 2012 that didn’t have at least one of the three teams, Mercedes, Red Bull or Ferrari standing on it, not to mention that the race itself was a welcome relief to an, up to that point, quite dull 2020 season.