On lap 4, Qin Miao took advantage of the moment to get past Norris, who'd just been overtaken by Alonso and had lost his rhythm a bit, moving himself up to ninth.
Zhou Guanyu, meanwhile, was opening up the gap to Qin Miao, because he was busy defending from Ricardo behind him.
The two drivers' lap times today were actually pretty similar, but the problem was that Zhou Guanyu couldn't shake Ricardo out of his DRS window before DRS was enabled, letting Ricardo stay within DRS range behind him the whole time, which dropped him into Ricardo's quagmire.
As for the top three, their positions still hadn't changed.
However, Hamilton had gotten into Verstappen's slipstream, while Perez, once DRS was activated, had already been dropped by 1.7 seconds by the pair, and as time went on, that gap kept widening.
Just like at the end of the 2021 season, Perez couldn't actually offer Verstappen that much on-track support; most of his impact was still on the strategic side.
