The championship battle between Hamilton and Verstappen is really tight with a single point separating the two drivers. Red Bull seem to have a faster car and have recently hired a Mercedes engineer to help them improve their power unit after Honda quits F1 at the end of the year. What seemed to be an easy 8th world championship for Lewis, will be the one he must fight hardest for!

Championship aside, F1 has unanimously agreed to change the format of a few races this season by bringing qualifying on Friday, having a sprint race on Saturday (with just a few points available to the drivers and teams) and then the normal race on Sundays. I’m not a huge fan of that idea but let’s see how this goes…

As for the predictions, the models thinks Lewis will start ahead of Max will win the race as well. Lando Norris is on a great form and I can’t wait to see what he does this week. Can Raikkonen do another magical lap like the one he did in this circuit last year?

You can access the power predictions here.

Driver	Qualifying Prediction	Actual Qualifying Result	Race Prediction	Actual Race Result
Hamilton	1	2	1	1
Verstappen	2	3	3	2
Bottas	3	1	2	3
Perez	4	4	4	4
Norris	6	7	5	5
Leclerc	5	8	8	6
Ocon	12	6	7	7
Alonso	14	13	13	8
Ricciardo	7	16	12	9
Gasly	9	9	9	10
Sainz	8	5	6	11
Giovinazzi	16	12	11	12
Vettel	17	10	10	13
Stroll	10	17	16	14
Tsunoda	13	14	15	15
Russell	15	11	17	16
Schumacher	19	19	19	17
Latifi	18	18	18	18
Mazepin	20	20	20	19
Raikkonen	11	15	14	R