The race is off and Max Verstappen won the 2021 Formula One World Championship with a last lap pass of Lewis Hamilton in a dramatic, controversial and truly astonishing Abadabie Grand Prix.

But how did it all come to this

and could Vastafan's Championship

still be under threat

giving the looming possibility of an appeal?

I'm Ed Straw and joining me to unravel

this most remarkable of world championship finale

as Scott Mitchell and Mark Hughes.

Well Mark, before we get into the controversy if we just take in isolation one thing that

happened today, which is one title contender in Max Verstappen, overtaking their title rival,

Lewis Hamilton, to win the F1 World Championship on the last lap, this does have to go down

as one of the most astonishing title deciders in F1 history, doesn't it?

Yeah, if you consider Lewis had led the whole race up until that point, with just a few corners to go, he wasn't leading. You know, apart from the little bit of overlap where Sergio Perez hadn't pitted yet. So yes, but I mean, that was just the start of it, wasn't it? Yeah, and, you know, the whole thing, there's a lot to get into in terms of the controversy, and we're going to talk about that at great length, but you couldn't script it, could you? And even if you did script a last lap past to change the championship destiny, you wouldn't have scripted it in this context. So just absolutely unbelievable. And Scott, we knew something historic was going to happen in Abu Dhabi today, whatever happened.

We knew there was every chance there could be some form of controversy.

But could you imagine it being such a weird situation?

No, absolutely not.

I think just the combination of circumstances mean that we always, I think we hold up,

or we did help, we held up into Lagos, Brazil, 2008

as the benchmark for a crazy Formula One title decider. I think we have a new one now.

This was, yeah, this was just absolutely remarkable. I think we were all bracing ourselves for it,

ending in, it could end in the worst

case scenario of going into the stewards room and resulting in some contentious official intervention.

...