Max Verstappen in the middle of the smoke
SportLocation Formula 1 Desk · 20 Sept 2026
A night-race restart turns into a tight, smoky three-car fight, with Verstappen’s orange car boxed into the chaos.
Max Verstappen is caught in the thick of it here, with the orange car running in a smoky three-car pack under the floodlights.
The interest is not just the haze, but what it does to the race: it blurs the braking points, hides the gaps and leaves the drivers committing almost blind into the corner.
Verstappen’s car sits between the silver machine ahead and the red car behind, which is exactly the sort of compressed restart that punishes anyone slow to react.
It is a sharp reminder that in Formula 1, the hardest part is not always outright pace. Sometimes it is keeping the car straight when the track is half-hidden and everyone around you is still on the throttle.