WATCH: On this day Max Verstappen defeated Lewis Hamilton in the most controversial F1 season finale for the 2021 world title

Max Verstappen won against Lewis Hamilton in the most controversial way ever at 2021 Abu Dhabi GP.

WATCH: On this day Max Verstappen defeated Lewis Hamilton in the most controversial F1 season finale for the 2021 world title

Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen on the 2021 Abu Dhabi GP podium (via IMAGO)

On this day in 2021, the world witnessed one of the biggest if not the biggest controversy in Formula 1. Max Verstappen overtook Lewis Hamilton in the ultimate lap of the race. The Dutch driver won his maiden world driver’s championship by a mere one-point lead. F1 fans around the world highly talked about the race situation and forced F1 to make rule changes due to this.

At the Abu Dhabi GP, near the ending stages of the race, Nicholas Latifi crashed his car and hence caused a safety car for the drivers. During this safety car, multiple drivers took a pit stop and so did Verstappen with a fresh new set of soft tires. However, the race leader Lewis Hamilton chose not to pit under the safety car.

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After the pit, between Verstappen and Hamilton, there were five cars in between the race leader and Verstappen after the pit stop. Nevertheless, after the culmination of the lap, race director Michael Masi allowed the lapped cars to overtake the safety car. This had never happened before in Formula 1 and it happened on this day.

FS Video

Since Verstappen had a new set of softs, he had the faster pace and could easily overtake Hamilton. However, with just four laps remaining Hamilton fought till the end but had to succumb to defeat and was overtaken in the last lap. This overtake then sparked an enticing racing action between the two drivers where Verstappen emerged victorious and finally scored his maiden world championship title.

Hamilton losing out to Verstappen was devastating for the Briton. As the Mercedes driver would have broken previous championship title records from Michael Schumacher of seven titles.

The exciting last-lap battle sparked a rule change from FIA

After the controversial victory from Max Verstappen, multiple things changed about F1 since that day. Primarily, the high amount of backlash from the Brackley-based outfit of Mercedes led to the subsequent dismissal of Michael Masi from his job. And Red Bull boss Christian Horner exclaimed that this dismissal was ‘harsh’.

Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton (Via IMAGO)
Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton (Via IMAGO)

The FIA regulations changed Article 55.13 following the incident between the drivers. Previously, FIA required cars that had been lapped to pass both the cars on the lead lap and the safety car. However, they immediately tweaked this rule, changing ‘any’ to ‘all’ lapped cars, aiming to prevent a recurrence of the controversial 2021 battle.

The majority of people on the grid decided to side with Hamilton in the kerfuffle as he deserved the victory and was potentially ‘robbed’ of achieving something great. However, multiple people on the grid also applauded Verstappen’s brilliance and disregarded him for any sort of unfair means as he did not take the final call of the race conditions.

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