Which racing driver won the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix Tournament held in March 2022 ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), Max Verstappen. The 2022 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix was held on 27 March 2022 at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit and was the second round of a Formula One season that ran to twenty-two Grands Prix. Max Verstappen, driving for Red Bull Racing, won it ahead of Charles Leclerc of Ferrari, who took second place and set the fastest lap of the race for the additional championship point, with Leclerc's team-mate Carlos Sainz Jr. third. The result was an early indication of how the season would go: Verstappen went on to win the drivers' championship for the second year in succession, clinching it at the Japanese Grand Prix, and Red Bull Racing took the constructors' championship, their fifth and their first since 2013, ending the long run of Mercedes titles. A word about the circuit, because it is asked in its own right. The Jeddah Corniche Circuit is a street track laid out along the Red Sea waterfront in Jeddah and is among the fastest street circuits in the sport; the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix was added to the calendar only in 2021, part of the wider movement of Formula One into West Asia, alongside the long-established Bahrain Grand Prix and the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix that closes the season. For an examination written in Maharashtra in August 2022, a question on this race is a straightforward test of whether a candidate follows international sport as part of current affairs, and it belongs to a category — the winner of a major international sporting event in the preceding year — that appears in almost every paper. The answer to be marked is option (2).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Charles Leclerc is the most dangerous of the three wrong options, because he was genuinely on the podium at Jeddah — he finished second, behind Verstappen, and set the fastest lap of the race, which under the rules then in force earned an additional championship point for a driver finishing in the top ten. Second place is not victory, and a question asking who won a named race is asking for one name. The option illustrates the standard construction of a well-made sports question: the distractors are not random drivers but the men who actually finished around the winner, so a candidate who remembers that a Ferrari was in contention at Jeddah, or that Leclerc had a strong start to the 2022 season, will find the option attractive. The corrective is to store race results as an ordered podium — first, second, third — rather than as a vague memory of who was competitive, because an examiner can ask for any of the three positions and the same preparation answers all of them. At Jeddah in 2022 the order was Verstappen, Leclerc, Sainz.  (c) Valtteri Bottas was not the winner at Jeddah in 2022, and the option is included as a name a candidate is likely to recognise from earlier seasons rather than from that one. Bottas had spent five seasons at Mercedes as team-mate to Lewis Hamilton, a period in which the team won championship after championship, and he left at the end of 2021 to drive for Alfa Romeo in 2022. That change of team is the fact worth attaching to his name, because it explains why a driver associated in a candidate's memory with the front of the field was no longer contending for race wins in the season this question is set in. The general lesson for sports questions is that team affiliations change between seasons and a name learnt with a team is only correct for the years in which it was true; recording the season alongside the driver and the team costs nothing and prevents exactly this kind of error, which is the sporting equivalent of the dating problem that runs through the whole current affairs section.  (d) Lewis Hamilton is the most recognisable name in the sport to a general reader, which is precisely why he is placed among the options, and 2022 was the worst season of his career by the measures that matter here. Driving for Mercedes, he took neither a pole position nor a Grand Prix victory in the whole of that season — the first time that had happened since his Formula One career began in 2007 — as Mercedes struggled with a car that was uncompetitive against the Red Bull and the Ferrari. He therefore cannot have won at Jeddah or anywhere else in 2022. The option works on name recognition alone, and it is a good illustration of why a candidate should not answer a sports question by choosing the most famous competitor: fame accumulates over a career while a race result belongs to a single afternoon, and current affairs questions ask about the afternoon. The 2022 season belonged to Max Verstappen and Red Bull Racing, who took the drivers' and constructors' championships respectively.

Concept: Formula One is contested over a season of Grands Prix — twenty-two in 2022 — with points awarded on a sliding scale to the top ten finishers in each race and an additional point for the fastest lap to a driver finishing in the top ten. Two championships are decided: the drivers' championship, on the points of individual drivers, and the constructors' championship, on the combined points of a team's two cars. The 2022 season was the first under a substantially rewritten set of technical regulations intended to let cars follow one another more closely, and the change reordered the competitive hierarchy: Mercedes, which had dominated the preceding era, fell back, and Red Bull Racing and Ferrari came to the front. Max Verstappen won the drivers' title for the second consecutive year, clinching it at the Japanese Grand Prix, and Red Bull Racing took the constructors' title, their fifth and their first since 2013. Lewis Hamilton, driving for Mercedes, finished the season without a pole position or a race win for the first time since his debut in 2007. The Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, held at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit on the Red Sea waterfront, entered the calendar in 2021 and is among the fastest street circuits in the sport; in 2022 it was the second round of the season, run on 27 March, and Verstappen won it from Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz Jr., both of Ferrari. The race sits within a broader pattern of major sport moving into West Asia, alongside the Bahrain and Abu Dhabi Grands Prix and the football World Cup held in Qatar later the same year.

State PCS 2022 Q78 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q78 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer