And once Hamilton realized Qin Miao had caught up, he also started to pick up the pace to keep Qin Miao from reeling him in.
Soon, the two of them crossed the finish line one after the other, and on the FIA world feed, the display above the timing tower on the right side of the driver list was already showing 56/56.
This was the final lap; once they crossed the finish line, the United States Grand Prix would be over.
And by using the long main straight plus his car's DRS, Qin Miao tucked into Hamilton's slipstream at the end of the main straight and cut the gap between them down to 1 second.
Now Qin Miao really only had one last chance to launch a threatening attack on Hamilton, and that was in the DRS zone of the second sector—the very last DRS zone of this race.
Over the entire first sector that followed, Qin Miao shaved another 0.2 seconds off the gap to Hamilton.
