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Max Verstappen claims first win of F1 season after enthralling battle with Charles LeClerc at Saudi Arabian Grand Prix

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Max Verstappen claims first win of F1 season after enthralling battle with Charles LeClerc at Saudi Arabian Grand Prix

The Purple Bull driver, second for a lot of the race, took the lead with just some laps to go and by no means relinquished it.

Similar to in Bahrain final week, the pair have been locked collectively in an enthralling battle, with the ultimate 10 laps of the race in Jeddah making for gripping watching.

The victory is Verstappen’s first of the 2022 season, having not completed in Bahrain final week.

Ferrari made up the remainder of the rostrum with LeClerc in second and Carlos Sainz in third.

The race got here on a tough weekend for F1, after missile strikes on an oil storage facility close to the monitor by Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

24-year-old Verstappen known as it a “actually powerful race however a very good race.”

“We have been each battling onerous on the entrance. We simply tried to play the lengthy sport,” Verstappen mentioned.

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“They have been actually fast by way of corners and we have been actually fast on the straight. The tires have been sporting out fairly fast. You might see by the top we had just a little bit extra tempo.

“I attempted to get by, it wasn’t straightforward, they have been taking part in good tips within the final nook, however ultimately I managed to get forward. Even after that he was continually within the DRS.

“Actually completely happy we lastly kick-started the season.”

From side to side

Having earned his nation’s first-ever pole place, Sergio Perez made an ideal begin on Sunday. The Mexican was fast off the road, blockading second-placed LeClerc in addition to sustaining his lead.

Nonetheless, his dream race quickly started to unravel.

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An obvious faux pit from Ferrari meant Purple Bull selected to pit Perez — dropping locations — simply moments earlier than Nicholas Latifi crashed, inflicting a security automotive to come back out which allowed different drivers to pit themselves.

It meant when the security automotive left the monitor, LeClerc lead, adopted by Verstappen with Perez down in fourth after giving up his third spot for a pit lane violation.

And with no obstructions forward of him, the Monegasque driver continued his glorious tempo in 2022, having received the opening race of the season in Bahrain final weekend.

The 24-year-old managed to carry off a flying Verstappen till a digital security automotive was known as into place within the thirty eighth lap after two vehicles each misplaced drive close to the pit lane.

After the second security automotive of the race was stopped, similar to in Bahrain final week, the 2 younger stars did battle as soon as once more.

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They went backwards and forwards, with Verstappen getting his nostril in entrance, just for LeClerc to come back roaring again.

Verstappen drives in front of LeClerc.

However with simply over three laps to go, the Dutch driver took the lead but once more and held on with a vice-like grip to assert his first victory of the season.

Each Verstappen and LeClerc have expressed their respect for each other earlier than, they usually might be seen embracing after their thrilling race.

And regardless of a disappointing end in Jeddah for LeClerc, he mentioned that “each race ought to be like this.”

“It was not sufficient right this moment. I actually loved that race, it was onerous racing however truthful! Each race ought to be like this. It was enjoyable, I needed to win right this moment,” he mentioned.

“We had two very totally different configurations with the Purple Bulls. We have been fairly fast within the nook, however sluggish in straights. It was extraordinarily tough for me to cowl Max within the straight. Max did a terrific job, it was a enjoyable race.”

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Verstappen and Leclerc embrace after the Saudi GP.

Away from the monitor

On Saturday, a joint assertion from System 1 and the game’s governing physique FIA confirmed the Saudi Grand Prix would happen this weekend regardless of an assault claimed by Yemen’s Houthi rebels on an oil storage facility close to the monitor on Friday.

The Saudi Grand Prix is the second race of the brand new season and comes on the seventh anniversary of the beginning of the civil warfare in Yemen.

Friday’s explosion on the Aramco facility — an F1 sponsor — occurred about 20 miles (32 kilometers) from the monitor and smoke might be seen billowing over town throughout Friday’s observe.

The second observe session was delayed by quarter-hour as groups and drivers have been known as to satisfy organizers. Mercedes workforce principal Toto Wolff informed reporters groups had been “assured that we’re protected” and the monitor was “in all probability the most secure place that you could be in Saudi Arabia” in the intervening time.

Nonetheless, sources informed CNN drivers felt uneasy after the assault and plenty of didn’t wish to drive within the race.

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The Houthis mentioned they used a “giant quantity” of drones to focus on the power in Friday’s assault.

The Saudi-led coalition combating the Houthis in Yemen mentioned one ballistic missile and 10 bomb-laden drones launched from the southern border by the Iran-backed rebels have been intercepted, in line with Saudi state-run TV channel al-Ekhbariya. The assertion didn’t point out an assault on Jeddah.

Smoke billows from an oil storage facility in Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coastal city of Jeddah on March 25, 2022.

There have been no casualties to this point within the assault, an official informed CNN.

Go to CNN.com/sport for extra information, options, and movies

Saudi state media later reported the Saudi-led Arab coalition launched airstrikes on what it mentioned have been “menace sources in Sanaa and Hodeidah” in Yemen, following Friday’s assault.

The port metropolis of Hodeidah is used to offer meals and humanitarian assist for Yemenis. Gasoline usually comes into the nation’s north through the port, which is managed by the Houthi rebels — however the Yemeni authorities, backed by Saudi warships, should give the vessels clearance to dock.

Irene Nasser in Hong Kong, Talia Kayali and Hira Humayun in Atlanta, Nic Robertson, Eyad Kourdi, Amanda Davies and Mostafa Salem contributed to this report.

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Wanted: more bosses on the shop floor

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Wanted: more bosses on the shop floor

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On the day of the US election this week, I was struck by a familiar sense of anxiety, dismay and dread.

This had almost nothing to do with the election and everything to do with my decision to spend time that day on the FT’s main news desk. 

In the interests of research, I wanted to see what the job of news editing looked like since I last worked on that desk in London many years ago. 

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Clearly much has changed since. The homepage is all-consuming; an entirely different team of editors handles the printed paper. But much is still the same, like the stomach-grinding anxiety about inserting an error in the rush to publish. And the heart-stopping fear of receiving a late, garbled story needing not so much editing as open-heart surgery. And the remorseless speed of the work.

“You all right?” muttered the news editor, a man I’ve known for close to 20 years, as I faffed about trying to log in to the first morning news meeting of top editors. Flustered, I finally got the sound on as he was explaining why I was there, whereupon I thanked him and called him Tim instead of his actual name, which is Tom.

This was a reminder of something I had forgotten in my years away from that work. It is so much harder than it looks from the outside.

The experience confirmed that business leaders who do what Boeing’s new chief executive, Kelly Ortberg, did the other week deserve much credit. 

When Ortberg set out his plans to restore faith in the beleaguered aerospace giant, he highlighted one in particular: putting executives on factory floors as part of “a fundamental culture change”.

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“We need to know what’s going on, not only with our products, but with our people,” he said. “We need to prevent the festering of issues and work better together to identify, fix, and understand root cause.”

This seems obvious for any company, let alone one reeling from the aftermath of two fatal crashes of its top-selling 737 Max aircraft.

Yet if it really were apparent, there wouldn’t be headlines whenever someone like Ortberg issues such an edict. Or Home Depot tells corporate office staff to work a full day at one of its stores each quarter, as it did this year. Or Uber’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, reveals he has been moonlighting as a driver, as he did last year. 

Maybe more bosses than we hear about spend time answering customer complaints on social media, such as Greg Jackson, chief executive of the UK’s Octopus Energy power supplier. Or decide a human can adjust a car window seal faster than a robot by trying it himself on an assembly line, as Elon Musk did at Tesla. 

But I doubt it. For one thing, few CEOs are like Musk. Also, running a business is hard. It can be easy to get caught up in the daily crossfire of drama. When Khosrowshahi was driving a customer to the airport one night, he had to ignore what the Wall Street Journal said were frantic phone calls from his chief legal officer trying to tell him the company’s network had been hacked.

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It also takes a lot of confidence to expose yourself to the ridicule of underlings who know more about how a job is done, especially for CEOs unfamiliar with the industry they join.

But I suspect many executives shy away from the shop floor because they have succumbed to an aspect of power poisoning, or the way behaviour changes when you reach the top.

In this case, they think that, because they are in charge, they understand everything they need to know in order to lead well, even when they palpably don’t. Academics call this the fallacy of centrality and it can be a dismaying thing to watch. Ask any worker repeatedly asked to do something provably unworkable by a clueless boss. 

Of course, hands-on experience alone does not guarantee success. Laxman Narasimhan did 40 hours of barista training before taking over as CEO of Starbucks and last year said he would keep working behind the counter for half a day each month. He was ousted 17 months later. Falling sales and an activist investor will probably always beat even the finest Frappuccino technique.

pilita.clark@ft.com

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Camarillo homeowners return to burned homes after devastating Mountain Fire

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Camarillo homeowners return to burned homes after devastating Mountain Fire

Camarillo homeowners have started to return to their scorched neighborhoods after the devastating Mountain Fire ripped through the area earlier this week. 

While some homes remain standing, many others have been reduced to rubble, with random pieces of furniture and appliances left behind. 

The fire, which has so far engulfed more than 20,000 acres and destroyed over 100 homes, broke out on Wednesday and quickly grew with the help of strong winds blowing through the area. 

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Flowers and a message of hope left behind in a decimated neighborhood in Camarillo after the Mountain Fire.

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It began in Moorpark before jumping SR-118 and entering neighborhoods in the foothills of Camarillo, where Jamie Randall and her husband Tyler Farnworth returned earlier this week to find that their home was gone. 

“I feel like the shock if wearing off a little bit,” Randall said. “It’s hard to see this. It’s harder today for me then it was even a few days ago to wrap my head around the gravity of what has happened to our home.”

The couple lived at the home with their children and were among the more than 10,000 residents forced to gather what they could and flee at a moment’s notice as the fire ripped through the neighborhood. 

Randall said that she packed two suitcases and grabbed some important documents, anticipating that they would be able to return home after the blaze was handled by firefighters. 

“I never thought in my wildest dreams this would be the last time I would be standing at my house,” she said. 

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They say that the fire hollowed out their home, reducing everything inside to ash. 

“There’s a few things that we wish we would have grabbed. Some things from my parents that are no longer with us,” said Farnworth. “Silly little things, you know.”

They say that it was more than just their home, but a community for the family, who owns a dance studio named Bobbie’s School of Performing Arts. 

After news was spread about their home, they say that they were contacted by an overwhelming amount of friends and families showing them love and support. 

“It spread so wide, the amount of love they’ve shown us and they continue to show us,” the family said. 

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The smiling statue of Buddha that survived the devastating Mountain Fire that ripped through a Camarillo neighborhood on Nov. 6.

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While they’re still unsure what their next steps may be, they’re taking one sign from the rubble as a bit of positivity — a smiling Buddha statue that survived the flames. 

“This is our home. This is our home, this is our street, these are our neighbors,” Farnworth said. “Everyone, I feel like, feels the same way.”

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Poorer voters flocked to Trump and other data points from the election

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Poorer voters flocked to Trump and other data points from the election

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Donald Trump’s win gave Republicans their highest share of the popular vote in two decades — and revealed big shifts in the US electorate, from the Democratic party’s reliance on wealthier, college-educated voters to the power of issues like immigration.

Low turnout by Democrats also hurt Kamala Harris’s chances while support from traditional left-leaning voting groups, such as Hispanic and Black voters, fell.

The results also show that poorer and less-educated voters now think Republicans best represent them — a reversal from 12 years ago, when Democrat Barack Obama was president.

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After a deep-dive into the data, here are five takeaways.

Democratic support depends on high-income voters

Economic realignment has been under way for some time, but hastened in this election. The Democratic party now appears to be the party of high-income voters, not those with low incomes.

For the first time in decades, Democrats received more support from Americans in the top third of the income bracket than from poorer groups, according to an FT analysis of voter surveys.

In contrast to 2020, the majority of lower-income households or those earning less than $50,000 a year voted for Trump this election. Conversely, those making over $100,000 voted for Harris, according to exit polls.

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At the same time, Trump enjoyed enduring support from voters without a college degree, with nearly two-thirds voting for the former president, according to exit polling in ten states by NBC News.

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Immigration probably pushed voters to Trump

A poll by Gallup before the election found that US voters saw immigration as the most important problem facing the country, with 55 per cent saying that it was a “critical threat” to the US.

The results from Tuesday show just how damaging the issue was for Harris, who was blamed by Trump for the record high number of border crossings during the Biden administration.

Some of the areas that swung furthest to the former president were on the US south-western border, including Hidalgo and Zapata counties in Texas and Santa Cruz County in Arizona.

In Texas, Trump managed to flip four counties on the US-Mexico border that had voted for Democratic presidential candidates since the 1970s.

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Trump captured the suburbs and cities became less Democratic

Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020 owed much to the big Democratic turnout in swing-state suburbs, including a blue wave in the majority-white suburbs of Pennsylvania and Georgia, as well as both majority-white and majority-Latino areas in Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona.

But on Tuesday, Trump captured more votes than Harris everywhere outside large cities, including suburban areas. In large urban areas, Democrats lost more than 1mn votes compared to 2020, according to an FT analysis of the results.

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The rural-urban divide has increasingly become an entrenched dimension of US politics, but this election saw a sharp drop in Democratic support in large cities, while rural areas continued to become more red.

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Hispanic-majority areas swung to Trump

Days before the election, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s disparaging remarks about Puerto Rico at a Trump rally cast doubt on the Republican candidate’s ability to win over Latino voters.

But the results showed that Latinos, as well as other non-white voters, are increasingly drawn to Trump. The shift could have lasting implications given Latinos are among the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the US.

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Even in liberal enclaves like Philadelphia, the most populous city in the swing state of Pennsylvania, voters swung towards Trump in majority-Hispanic areas, even while Harris won those precincts overall, according to an FT analysis of municipal data.

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In Texas, some of the largest swings towards Trump also came from majority-Hispanic counties, including Starr County on the US-Mexico border, which has a Hispanic population of over 96 per cent.

Trump even managed to flip Florida’s most populous county, the majority-Hispanic Miami-Dade County, for the first time since 1988.

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Low turnout among Democrats accentuated the swing towards Trump

Not all of the swing towards Trump across the country was attributable to an increase in support for the Republican.

While New York swung to Trump by 12 points in 2024, fewer than 190,000 additional people voted for him than in 2020. But 800,000 fewer people voted for Harris than Biden in the state. Illinois and Ohio followed a similar trend.

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Of the swing states, only in Pennsylvania did Democrats lose more votes than Trump gained. In Wisconsin, Georgia and North Carolina, the party increased their vote count — albeit only by 300 in the North Carolina.

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Harris’s turnout effort did bear some fruit, with current estimates showing that the proportion of the voting-eligible population who voted increased in all but two of the swing states.

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Additional reporting by Radhika Rukmangadhan in New York and Alan Smith in London

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