Lindblad Thrives in Monza Chaos as Racing Bulls Battle Alpine
Arvid Lindblad climbed out of the car at Monza with the look of a driver who’d just gone 12 rounds rather than 53 laps. This was not the usual F1 procession he felt he’d signed up for. This was chaos. This was F2 and F3-style warfare at 330 km/h.
He loved it.
The Italian Grand Prix turned into a long‑range brawl down Monza’s endless straights, a race of surges and slingshots where the lead pack yo‑yoed lap after lap. Despite tweaks to the regulations since Australia, the series still serves up these stop‑start, DRS‑driven scraps on certain circuits, and Monza once again exposed that dynamic in full.
Up front, it was relentless. The Mercedes pair of George Russell and Andrea Kimi Antonelli traded blows, with Max Verstappen’s Red Bull, Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari and Oscar Piastri’s McLaren all piling into the same narrow window of asphalt. Lando Norris joined late, turning the fight at the sharp end into a rolling street battle at 300 kph.
Even Alpine and a rookie added teeth to it. Pierre Gasly and Franco Colapinto muscled their way into the mix at various stages, while the midfield staged its own private war. Then came the red flag. And with it, a reset that killed much of the drama for those stuck in no-man’s land.
Lindblad was one of them.
After the stoppage, the Racing Bulls driver found himself in eighth, marooned between two very different races: a fierce Norris–Gasly scrap up the road and a distant train behind involving Colapinto, Haas’ Oliver Bearman and team-mate Yuki Tsunoda. The gaps ballooned. The tension, at least in his mirrors, evaporated.
For a driver who’d just tasted the raw edge of elbows‑out combat, the contrast stung.
“No, it was fun,” Lindblad said afterwards, pushing back on any suggestion the race had been too wild. He argued that F1 usually suffers from the opposite problem. “F1’s a bit… it’s got not got enough racing, and it’s a bit too single file. If you watch an F2 or an F3 race, that’s what it’s like the whole time.”
Monza, for once, felt like that to him. A proper scrap. A dog fight.
“I think it was good for the sport to show that,” he said. He admitted it might not be the purest way to showcase overtaking or racecraft, with drivers using energy deployment and DRS in a kind of tactical tug-of-war rather than a clean, decisive pass. But he didn’t sound remotely apologetic about enjoying it. “It was cool to have a bit of a scrap, have a bit of a dog fight going on. Because that’s what we’re all here for, so I enjoyed it.”
Then the red flag dropped, the field reset on hard tyres, and the race he wanted disappeared.
“I was honestly a bit sad when the red flag came out because we all just put on the hard and went to the end, and there wasn’t really much of a race anymore,” he admitted. “It was pretty boring for me. It was 10 seconds in front, 10 seconds behind, and just cruising around.”
From a sporting perspective, though, that lonely cruise mattered. Eighth place brought home important points in Racing Bulls’ fight with Alpine for fifth in the constructors’ championship. With Tsunoda 10th, Gasly seventh and Colapinto ninth, the Italian weekend ended with Racing Bulls still holding a seven‑point cushion in that battle.
Given the pace picture, Lindblad saw it as damage limitation done right.
“Yeah, I think it’s good,” he said of the result. “In the end, it was the maximum that was possible, so we should be happy. In the end, Alpine have had the upper hand this week. They’ve been way faster than us on the straights.”
On a circuit like Monza, that kind of deficit usually hurts. A lot. Racing Bulls knew they were exposed here, and they approached Sunday with that reality in mind. Limiting the losses became the mission.
“We know this is a very unique circuit, so I think to limit the damage here was good,” Lindblad said. He pointed to the car’s broader potential beyond the Temple of Speed. “We’re very confident that we know the package we have in the upcoming rounds, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”
There is one cloud on the horizon. Tsunoda’s 10th place could yet come under threat if Audi’s appeal goes ahead and succeeds, potentially shuffling the points again. For now, though, the scoreboard stands: Racing Bulls still in front of Alpine, still clinging to that crucial fifth place.
Monza gave Lindblad a taste of the kind of racing he craves and a reminder of how brutal F1’s margins can be. The question now is simple: when the circus leaves the slipstream tracks behind, will Racing Bulls’ “package” turn survival into a genuine charge up the order?
