Until this year’s race brought the title to 11, 10 Abu Dhabi Grands Prix have been won from pole position since Yas Marina arrived on the F1 calendar in 2009. Overtaking has ever been a challenging task here, dictating processional racing built on strategies embracing minimal risk and safety in numbers.
These thoughts will have been playing on McLaren team principal Andrea Stella’s mind, for he was Fernando Alonso‘s race engineer during the second Abu Dhabi GP, when Ferrari pitted Alonso to cover the pitstop of Red Bull’s Mark Webber, only for Fernando to spend the rest of the race studying Vitaly Petrov‘s gearbox while Sebastian Vettel romped home to win the race and the championship. Vettel, like Max Verstappen in 2025, had not led the championship all year.
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– The Autosport.com Team