Red Bull’s Verstappen comes up trumps in chaotic Australian GP

MELBOURNE: Max Verstappen won the Australian GP on Sunday as two late red flags and a slew of crashes threw the race into chaos before the Red Bull driver was allowed a processional victory lap around Albert Park. Double defending champion Verstappen was leading Mercedes’s Lewis Hamilton with a few laps left when Kevin Magnussen crashed his Haas into a wall, leaving debris on the track and halting the race. The cars returned to the grid with fresh tyres for a two-lap sprint to decide the winner, but in a chaotic restart, Williams driver Logan Sargeant drove into the back of AlphaTauri’s Nyck de Vries to knock both of them into gravel at turn one. Alpine drivers Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon then crashed into each other to leave a trail of debris on the track and trigger another red flag, the third and last of the race. After lengthy deliberations, stewards decided that the race would finish with one lap behind a safety car in the order of the previous start – minus the cars that had crashed out. That allowed Verstappen (2:32:38.371) to earn his second win of the season ahead of Hamilton (+0.179 seconds), with Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso (+0.769 seconds) third in a race in which eight of the 20 cars failed to finish.