Chapter 1512: Hanging by a Thread

At this point, Qin Miao also felt a bit overwhelmed.

However, he remained relatively calm inside.

After all, when the race began and his car was damaged, Qin Miao had already somewhat anticipated that it wouldn’t be likely for him to win today’s race.

And after coming up behind Qin Miao, the Red Bull strategy team, which had accumulated considerable experience in dealing with him, began advising Verstappen over the team radio.

“Max, you have a five-second time penalty, so overtaking Qin Miao today is not enough. We need to widen the gap with him to over five seconds on the track. We believe you can do it.”

“Do you have any good plans?”

“Approach Qin Miao using your regular race pace, then overtake him as quickly as you can according to your ideas. Don’t waste too much time stuck behind him.”

This is where foreigners have a disadvantage in using English. The entropy in English words is too low. If it were in Chinese, it would directly boil down to: putting all effort into one decisive move.

After being reminded by the team, Verstappen also remembered he was carrying a five-second penalty, so he couldn’t waste too much time behind Qin Miao.

After a brief discussion, Verstappen didn’t go all out in chasing Qin Miao on the track.

Nevertheless, despite this, Verstappen closed in on Qin Miao by one second in his first lap out of the pit and by 1.4 seconds in the second lap.

Don’t think Verstappen’s pace in closing the gap to Qin Miao is too outrageous.

It’s important to know that the single-lap speed of soft tires on the Catalonia track is over a second faster than hard tires, plus Qin Miao’s set of hard tires has been running for quite a while. Combined with the speed advantage of Verstappen’s car over the W14, all these factors contribute to Verstappen being so fast per lap.

And this is even without Verstappen pushing to the limit. If he truly went all out in chasing Qin Miao on the track, his single-lap speed could be about two seconds faster than Qin Miao’s.

At this point, it’s only the 55th lap, and the original 6.5-second gap between Qin Miao and Verstappen has been reduced to 4.1 seconds.

Qin Miao can even see Verstappen behind him through the rearview mirror.

However, the more critical the moment, the clearer and calmer Qin Miao’s mind becomes. At this point, rather than panicking, Qin Miao started quickly considering how to defend himself when Verstappen eventually catches up.

Is there any effective method to hinder Verstappen’s pace?

In a noisy environment, normal people find it hard to think rationally about any issue, let alone in a Formula 1 car.

Normally, drivers while racing in F1 are eager to immerse their entire mind and soul in driving, and hardly anyone has spare time to think about other matters.

That’s why drivers need a dedicated track engineer.

This is essentially an external brain for drivers during a race, assisting in making many decisions.

But Qin Miao is different; he can even let his mind wander while driving, not to mention thinking about other things. This might seem unimaginable to other drivers, but for Qin Miao, it’s effortless.

So by the 57th lap, when Verstappen closed the gap to 1.7 seconds behind Qin Miao, he finally thought of a method to slightly disrupt Verstappen’s attack rhythm.

As for completely locking Verstappen behind him, Qin Miao doesn’t think he can do it, at least not driving the current W14 on the Catalonia track.

In the 58th lap, Verstappen entered the DRS zone behind Qin Miao.

At this moment, all Red Bull fans and Verstappen’s fans believed that, being in the DRS zone behind Qin Miao, Verstappen would quickly overtake Qin Miao with lightning speed as he did before.

But in reality, Verstappen didn’t hastily make a move on Qin Miao upon entering the DRS zone behind him.

Verstappen knows well that while Qin Miao’s defense ability this season seems rather average, often being forcefully overtaken on the track…

Those are deceptive appearances. Before overtaking Qin Miao, Verstappen would at least spend three laps charging the car’s battery and narrowing the gap with Qin Miao.

Any time the effort to attack Qin Miao wasn’t made wholeheartedly, Qin Miao would demonstrate what it meant to be a solid wall and a sighing barrier.

Today, on the track, Verstappen continued using the method he learned from Qin Miao to overtake him.

Even when Qin Miao intentionally showed a flaw, Verstappen didn’t consider forcibly inserting into Qin Miao’s inside line to attempt an attack.

Seeing this, Qin Miao further braked to the point of getting slight rear-wheel smoke while entering T9 from the outside line, losing track position.

And this time, Qin Miao’s attempt to show a flaw went somewhat overboard. At that moment, if Verstappen had simply taken the inside line and braked later, he could have overtaken Qin Miao quite easily at that turn.

Even after showing this flaw, Qin Miao slightly regretted it, because calling it ‘showing a flaw’ sounds fine, but saying it’s ‘a mistake due to nervousness when Verstappen didn’t take the bait several times’ hits the nail on the head.

But Verstappen’s actions left Qin Miao feeling deeply helpless, because despite Qin Miao’s mistake, Verstappen still didn’t attack. Instead, he followed Qin Miao into the corner.