That looks like a fun place to be, doesn’t it? Monza post-Ferrari victory was Planet Earth’s best party of September 8th 2019. No doubt about it.

Leclerc weathered everything that Mercedes could throw at him over the course of the race and showed he wasn’t afraid to do some elbows-out defensive driving against the World Champion. How happy you are with that depends on who you support. If Lewis, maybe a little strong. If anyone else, great, exciting racing.

Ferrari’s hard tire strategy proved to be the right one as the 21-year old fended off medium-shod attacks from Hamilton and Bottas until the Silver Arrows drivers fell back with their tires spent. The low-drag setups the cars were running seemed to massively reduce the effectiveness of DRS as well. Even with their wing flaps open the Mercedes drivers could only watch as Leclerc slingshotted his Ferrari out of Parabolica and down the start/finish straight over and over. Hats off to that engine and its makers!

The best part of the whole thing was watching Leclerc, free of the immediately-recent death of a friend, get to celebrate to his heart’s content. The fact that he had thousands of rabid Ferrari fans to share it just made it sweeter. Ferrari win in Italy .

The reason Vettel failed to climb back up the pack by the end of the race is anyone’s guess. Maybe that unforced error really got in his head, but you’d expect a guy with his experience and one of the best 6 cars on the track to do better than 13th place after early trouble. Max does it all the time!