Meet Amazon Quick Suite: The agentic AI application reshaping how work gets done
Quick Suite helps you cut through the noise of fragmented information, siloed applications, and repetitive tasks to focus on what matters.
Written by Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President, AWS Agentic AI
Key takeaways
- Quick Suite is AWS’s agentic AI application that helps employees transform how they find insights, conduct deep research, automate tasks, visualize data, and take actions across apps.
- Quick connects to your information across internal repositories like wikis and intranets, popular applications, AWS services like S3 and Redshift, and access integrations with MCP to connect to 1,000+ apps.
- Ask any question and get insightful answers.
- Battle-tested by tens of thousands of Amazon employees and dozens of customers, you can use Quick for tasks consumer AI shouldn’t handle.
We’ve all experienced how AI can transform our personal lives, but this same experience hasn’t been unlocked at work—yet. Consumer AI solutions aren’t connected to all your business data. They don’t have access to the tools you need to get things done at work. And many organizations won’t even let you use consumer offerings, because they lack critical security and privacy features.
That’s why we invented Amazon Quick Suite. It’s the AI experience people love with the security and privacy enterprises trust. Quick is your AI teammate that collaborates with you to get work done. With Quick, you can ask questions and get detailed answers, conduct deep dive research, analyze and visualize data, and create automations for workflows to save time and let you focus on the big picture. And thanks to the enterprise-grade security and privacy standards, Quick can work across all your information, so you finally get the fully featured gen AI experience you want at work, while knowing your queries are never used to train a model.
With Quick, we are entering a new era of work. Interact with Quick through an intuitive, web-based experience or integrations across your browser, Office 365, and more. Working with an AI agent is now as simple as chatting with a teammate. Make a request, ask a question, or automate a task. Quick works with you to help you go from insight directly to action. To see these capabilities firsthand, watch my video overview of Amazon Quick Suite.
We’ve been testing Quick with employees across Amazon and key customers to ensure it’s up to the demands of today’s workplace, and the results speak for themselves. Amazon employees are turning tasks that used to take days into minutes, automating the development of critical reports, and building their own benches of personalized agents. Propulse Lab, a leading marketing automation company, used Quick to streamline their customer service workflows, reducing the average time spent handling tickets by 80%—with a planned expansion of this workflow, they predict they will save over 24,000 hours annually. Based on the results they’ve already seen with Quick, DXC Technology, a global provider of information technology services, is planning to deploy it across more than 120k users, while Vertiv, a provider of critical digital infrastructure, plans to scale their users by more than 25% in 2026.
So how does Quick Suite work?
Bring everything together with Quick Index and Spaces
Quick Index makes it simple for you to connect to the sources and applications that matter. With over 50 built-in connectors for applications like Adobe Analytics, SharePoint, Snowflake, Google Drive, OneDrive, Outlook, ServiceNow, Databricks, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon S3, Quick brings together all your data securely to ensure you have full context for every decision. Using integrations with OpenAPI or Model Context Protocol (MCP) customers can connect to custom resources and 1,000+ apps by taking advantage of popular MCP servers from Atlassian, Asana, Box, Canva, PagerDuty, Workato, Zapier, and many more. You can then add additional files, dashboards, and other information to dedicated Spaces for you and your team to collaborate.
Ask questions and build agents
Once you’ve connected your data to Quick, you can start interacting with the chat assistant. You can ask Quick to write and send communications for you, or if you want Quick to write in your style or for a particular task (like writing a case study), you can use natural language or point Quick at existing guides or documentation to create a custom agent able to communicate in your intended style.
Analyze and visualize data with Quick Sight
Quick Sight makes business intelligence accessible to everyone with a new agentic experience, helping you gain insights to make better decisions. Unlike traditional business intelligence tools that work only with databases and data warehouses, Quick Sight’s agentic experience analyzes all forms of data across all your systems and apps, including your documents.
For example, a marketer can now easily look at a dashboard of their campaign data with metrics and customer feedback and ask questions in natural language about how the campaign is performing. They get a crisp analysis of the data in seconds without hours of manual statistical analysis, compiling sentiment from feedback, and summarizing the findings into a narrative—no business intelligence or data science experience required.
Dive deep into complex questions with Quick Research
Quick Research is the most accurate and reliable research agent on the market, ready to answer your most in-depth questions. It’s like having your own personal Ph.D. to provide comprehensive answers and reports to questions that require extensive research. It uses sophisticated analysis capabilities and extended processing to dive into your company’s data, and the public internet, including real-time information from 200+ outlets like The Associated Press, The New York Times, Washington Post, and Forbes. Quick Research can turn weeks-long research projects into quick-turn results, all with fully cited sources you can trust.
We tested Quick Research on DeepResearch Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating research agents, using a collective jury, where it provided the most accurate and reliable research across a range of tasks. The Last Mile Delivery team at Amazon used Quick Research to assess the potential impact of new legislation on a particular country that had been previously enacted in other countries. In 30 minutes, Quick Research delivered an in-depth analysis of how this legislation impacted other countries and their associated partner organizations, while also providing details on references and research methodology. This sort of research previously took multiple team members two weeks to complete.
Streamline repetitive tasks with Quick Flows
We all have those routine tasks, like compiling weekly reports or preparing for a recurring meeting, that take up your time every week. Quick Flows helps you use simple prompts to create automated workflows that handle repetitive tasks, reducing errors and freeing you and your team from busy work. For example, a program manager at AWS created a Flow to report on new, in-progress, and closed Asana tickets from the past week, compare them against the previous week’s status and committed items, and generate an executive summary email for leadership, saving multiple hours of manual work each week.
Handle complex multi-system workflows with Quick Automate
When these processes get complex and require hundreds of steps to be securely executed across multiple enterprise systems, like insurance claims processing or onboarding a new employee, teams wish that these tasks could be streamlined, but they lack the sophisticated automation tools and expertise to do it. With natural language prompts or by simply using existing documentation for their standard operating procedure, Quick Automate coordinates even the most complex business workflows across multiple applications, systems, or departments.
For instance, the Amazon Finance team uses Quick Automate to reconcile thousands of invoices every month. Quick Automate pulls information across multiple external transportation management systems, cross referencing this content with internal data from Amazon systems to help teams forecast cashflow, identify payment blockers, and conduct root cause analysis. The team built this automation without a dev team in days instead of weeks, and Quick made it easy to scale across multiple teams. Customers, such as Kitsa, have found the computer use agent in Quick Automate to be the most accurate solution for browser automation, helping them reliably automate their most complex and sensitive workflows across applications at scale.
Quick works wherever you are. With an intuitive web application, extensions in popular browsers like Chrome and Firefox, and extensions in Microsoft Outlook, Teams, and Word, Quick helps you find answers and act immediately in your flow of work.
Quick Suite is already transforming work for Amazon employees and customers
Quick serves people across every department and role—from sales reps to marketers, to CEOs and CIOs, to engineers and IT. Employees across Amazon, along with customers like Vertiv, DXC, 3M, Jabil, dLocal, Propulse Lab, and Kitsa, are already seeing amazing results with Quick:
Research in high gear
Jessica Gibson, vice president and associate general counsel at Amazon, sees an enormous benefit using Quick Research to help the Legal, Public Policy, and Compliance departments keep up with shifting global requirements that impact their business. From a single prompt, Quick Research helps her team synthesize complex requirements for specific geographic regions and provide recommendations at remarkable speed. “This same task used to require many hours of outside counsel, research, and writing,” said Gibson. By using Quick Research to compile these reports, her team can “stay agile while optimizing both time and resources.”
Automations that work
Kitsa, a customer that builds software to help expedite clinical trials, used Quick Automate to pore through hundreds of webpages and found that they were able to analyze sites for clinical trials in days that previously took months—with a 91% cost savings. “Compared to similar offerings like Manus and ChatGPT Operator, we achieved the highest accuracy and data coverage for our use case,” said Rohit Banga, the company’s co-founder and CTO.
Data-driven business decisions
Robbie Wright, a senior product marketer at AWS, uses Quick Flows to build a repeatable workflow to draft monthly business reviews based on business metrics from Quick Sight, campaign performance reporting from Adobe Analytics, and content from emails, and other internal documents. This saves time and helps his team make more informed decisions about ongoing campaigns faster.
“The workflow makes it simple to combine multiple sources into a concise update for our leaders,” Wright said. “I can now complete these projects 90% faster, and the quality of my reports has improved dramatically because I spend less time chasing numbers and more time providing my own insights.”
An AI-driven transformation
Jabil, a global leader in engineering, supply chain, and manufacturing solutions, is embracing Quick so that employees can use natural language to research regulatory updates across key industries faster and to optimize account collections and request for quote (RFQ) submissions. The automations in account collections and RFQs alone are expected to save about $400,000 annually as a result!
“The multi-tier AI architecture powered by Quick consolidates chatbots and information sources, increasing our manufacturing speed and flexibility,” said May Yap, Jabil’s CIO. “As part of our AI-driven transformation, these unified capabilities are helping us drive efficiencies and operational excellence.”
Complex workflows made simple
Natalie Fischbeck works in business development on Amazon’s Workforce Staffing team, and in one week she built 39 customized AI agents using Quick to help her complete complex tasks in minutes.
“Quick has given me the opportunity to create an accessible hub of institutional knowledge that would otherwise be scattered,” she said. “We now have scalable, logic-based agents that track all our leads and solutions at a high level. Because they pull from all our most recent emails and documents, they can provide dynamic updates almost instantly.”
Beyond productivity: A whole new way of working
What strikes me about these examples isn’t just the time saved—it’s how Quick is fundamentally changing our relationship with work. It’s removing the busy work that used to consume valuable time and energy and gives us the time back to focus on what matters. It brings together all the data, metrics, and institutional knowledge you need to make decisions, and helps you act on these decisions to drive outcomes.
We’ve been blown away by all the creative ways people have used Quick so far, and we’re excited to see how others will use it in the future. There are so many possibilities to dig into with these tools, and our team is hard at work finding ways to make them even more useful for customers in the future.
‘Fear’ and ‘chaos’ grip federal workers as Trump rapidly remakes the government
More than a dozen civil servants detailed to NBC News their experiences over the past 10 days as Trump moves to quickly upend the federal workforce.
Trump administration rescinds controversial freeze on federal assistance
03:12
Jan. 31, 2025, 4:29 AM GMT+7
By Allan Smith
Fear, anger and confusion have swept across federal agencies as workers grapple with a deluge of orders from President Donald Trump that they see as an effort to “scare” them out of their jobs.
In conversations with more than a dozen federal employees across multiple agencies, civil servants said the Trump administration’s rapid changes have turned their day-to-day operations into “chaos,” with their immediate higher-ups unable to answer questions about their employment and duties. A number of these workers also expressed surprise at what they saw as an underwhelming response from Congress and their union.
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Adding to the stress, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) offered federal employees the option of taking a “deferred resignation” in a Tuesday evening email that closely mirrored a message that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and leader of Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” sent to Twitter employees shortly after he acquired the company.
One official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which administers foreign aid and has had some of the greatest disruption so far in Trump’s second term, said the broad effort to quickly reshape the federal workforce has sent a chill through the building.
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“There’s a lot of fear about returning to the office,” this person said. “There’s a lot of fear about being fired, specifically with the OPM email that came out about offering buyouts. There’s a lot of skepticism about that, given the fact that this email seemed to model Elon Musk’s email to the Twitter folks who never got paid. So it’s caused a lot of chaos and turmoil. I think the point is to really scare people and make them think that their jobs are threatened. It’s definitely working.”
The federal employees who spoke with NBC News would only do so under the condition of anonymity, believing their jobs would otherwise be at jeopardy. Many of the employees who were dismayed about the Trump administration’s effort still expressed an interest in keeping their jobs, in part out of a sense of duty, and in part out of necessity.
The White House defended its broad effort to remake federal agencies and shake up the civil service — a core pledge of Trump’s campaign and a longtime aim of Republican leaders.
“For far too long, a bloated federal bureaucracy has cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars each year while strangling American enterprise and families with burdensome rules and regulations,” Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement. “President Trump received a resounding mandate to streamline our gargantuan government to better serve the needs of the American people. He will use every lever of executive and legislative power to deliver.”
‘They’re trying to insult us’
Those lever-pulls began in the hours after Trump took office and have continued unabated in the days since. In one of his first moves upon returning to the White House, Trump signed an executive order mandating that all federal agencies quickly order employees back to the office full time and end remote-work arrangements, aside from those deemed necessary. His administration days later released a directive demanding an end to all remote-work arrangements, claiming they are greatly inhibiting government performance.
“They’re trying to insult us, to be honest, to say that we’re not being productive,” an official at the Department of Transportation said. “And that’s simply not the case for a lot of people who are working remotely. … We have so many different series of jobs that don’t require people to be in the building.”
Trump’s moves included signing executive orders demanding an end to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs throughout the government and making it easier to fire career civil servants in policy-making roles. OPM then released memos instructing agencies to “terminate” DEIA offices and positions and offering a broad definition of what officials could be seen as holding a policy-making role.
He also ordered reforms to the federal hiring process, instituted a hiring freeze at federal agencies and a freeze on regulatory proposals. Additionally, the Office of Management and Budget on Wednesday rescinded a memo issued Monday outlining a temporary freeze on federal aid that sent agencies scrambling to adjust and stirred Trump’s opponents to action.
“It’s very low,” an employee at the Social Security Administration said of office morale. “There are a lot of people looking for other work. … We’re afraid to get fired. I don’t have a backup job right now and I understand that the market is getting ready to be saturated. We already have several people who are leaving our office.”
Trump’s push to reshape the government reached a crescendo after a military helicopter and commercial jet collided midair near Washington, D.C., on Wednesday night. All 67 passengers aboard the two aircraft were feared dead in one of the deadliest air disasters in U.S. history.
Though an investigation into what led to the crash is just beginning, Democrats and their allies noted that Trump’s wide-ranging actions aimed at the civil service, including the hiring freeze and an order overhaul hiring practices at the Federal Aviation Administration, could exacerbate air travel safety issues.
On the other hand, Trump on Thursday blamed diversity practices for the crash, which he said showed why his administration was pursuing changes to federal hiring practices.
A civil servant at the Department of Veterans Affairs described the environment amid Trump’s rapid fire changes as “absolute chaos,” adding, “Nobody really has any clue what’s going on.”
“We haven’t gotten any direction outside of … a memo about the DEI stuff and [it’s] almost like we’re encouraged to snitch on anybody that we find.”
The person called the return-to-work mandate “really ridiculous,” saying remote-work agreements with government employees have been in place for years, long before the pandemic, and have been encouraged by the agency.
This person and other civil servants who spoke with NBC News noted that a substantial number of federal employees don’t live near a federal office building and a return-to-work mandate would require some to sell homes and move. The federal government employs more than 2 million civilian employees, with 7.56% working in Washington, D.C., according to OPM data.
“A lot of people who work for the federal government do it out of a sense of service,” this person, an Iraq War veteran, said. “It’s rapidly becoming like they don’t want us here.”
One agency that’s had some of the most drastic overhauls so far is USAID. On Monday, more than 50 career civil servants there were placed on administrative leave, with the acting administrator saying in an email that “several actions within USAID” appeared to run afoul of Trump’s executive orders. Earlier, Trump froze virtually all U.S. foreign assistance pending a 90-day review.
“It is chaos over here right now,” a second USAID official said of the environment at the agency on Monday. “People in the halls are getting texts saying to log off of all government equipment and leave the building. No official announcements have been made, but individuals are being notified. People are walking around, whispering and crying. It’s like watching a sniper work through a captive crowd.”
The pause on foreign assistance had officials at other offices scrambling, too. An official at the Fish and Wildlife Service, which conducts foreign wildlife conservation, described a somber mood at the agency in light of a stop-work order. They also noted confusion over the scope of Trump’s Schedule F order — which aims to make it easier to oust policy-making civil servants.
“It’s just so f—ing maddening,” this person said. “I’m so pissed off right now.”
‘Nobody’s going to take that’
As federal employees were weighing the effect of Trump’s full collection of executive orders and further guidance from his administration, they were greeted with an email titled “Fork in the Road” in their inbox Tuesday evening. The email contained an offer of “deferred resignation,” allowing them to resign by Feb. 6 but get paid through September. Most full-time federal employees were eligible, aside from members of the military, postal workers, immigration enforcement officials as well as some other roles.
The email had Musk’s fingerprints. He sent a similar message titled “Fork in the Road” to Twitter employees soon after taking control of the company; it asked them to opt in to continue working for the social media platform or take three months of severance pay. (Musk later got a lawsuit dismissed from Twitter employees who argued they were not paid their full severance package.)
The OPM website now features a “Fork” tab.
“The Trump administration’s recent efforts to encourage the bulk of the federal workforce to resign are perplexing, of questionable legality and dangerous,” Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, said, adding, “Stripping away expert talent through such a nonstrategic approach puts all of us at risk in a profound way.”
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Most federal workers who spoke with NBC News did not express interest in taking the offer, with some doubting whether they would even be paid out if they did.
“I don’t know anybody who’s interested in taking it,” the first USAID official said. “And honestly, eight months is not a lot of money. These people have families. They have kids. So what, you get $60,000 bucks? That’s nothing. So maybe if you’re a 25-year-old, that’s a lot of money — and it probably won’t even be that much. Or if you’re on your way out the door, fine. But for most people, nobody’s going to take that.”
The official at the Transportation Department said they believed “maybe a few people” are “considering it” — mostly those who work in locations where returning to in-office work won’t be as easy as a simple commute.
One federal employee who works as a human resources supervisor near Washington, D.C., said they were “tempted” to take the offer since she believes her higher salary and position would likely put her at the top of the list if layoffs occur.
“You can stay and fight or you can leave,” this person said. “I just don’t know how much a federal employee will be situated to fight when all the odds are stacked for someone to fire you.”
Democrats and federal employee advocates argued that civil servants should not take the offer. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said in a Senate floor speech on Tuesday that Trump would “stiff” federal workers who choose to resign. And Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), said in a statement that the offer “should not be viewed as voluntary,” adding the administration’s “goal is to turn the federal government into a toxic environment where workers cannot stay even if they want to.” The union later sent an FAQ to members saying it is encouraging them “NOT to resign or respond” to the email “until you have received further information and clarification.”
But for all the shock and awe of the administration’s first days, much of what Trump has wrought should not have come as a surprise, since he discussed his intentions at length during the presidential campaign. In fact, his aim to drastically reshape the civil service was core to his agenda and a major focus of opponents who sought to limit his ability to do so or raise the alarm about potential consequences.
Still, federal employees said the speed and scope of the effort has startled colleagues.
“It’s surprising a lot of people, not everyone,” a U.S. Forest Service employee said. “Everything he’s done, he’s talked about. … A lot of people, they’re like, ‘Oh, you know, he’s all talk.’ And I just don’t think that that’s the case anymore.”
The first USAID official said there was broad awareness that Trump would seek to implement these changes upon taking office, but given how large and slow-moving the government is, the speed with which things are happening has come as a surprise.
More stunning was what this person saw as a lack of response from Congress and allies.
“They just seem to be sitting back and sort of keeping their mouth shut, which is also difficult. … I don’t know where the lawyers are,” the USAID official said. “There’s not a lot of communication about what can be done to stop it. It just seems like everybody’s just sort of moving along and being like, ‘OK, this is what we’re doing.’ And that’s also disconcerting.”
Saying they “have not heard one scintilla of anything from Congress so far,” the Transportation Department official also lamented not having “really any clear message from the union for the people that they are supposed to be representing.”
The union has taken some steps to combat the administration on these issues. In addition to putting out the FAQ on Wednesday, AFGE and its allies filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration challenging the executive order making it easier to fire civil servants. Earlier, the union sued Trump and OMB over the Department of Government Efficiency.
Generally, though, federal employees are gearing up and hunkering down for what they think could be difficult four years.
“Everyone’s trying to just stick it out,” the Forest Service employee said. “Obviously, no one’s really feeling all that great.”
The Fish and Wildlife Service official said most people they’ve spoken to aren’t looking to leave.
“We’re trying to hang on,” this person said.
A second Veterans Affairs employee even said the broad effort to squeeze the federal workforce has their colleagues banding together.
“There is a little bit of a sense of optimism that this is just the shock stage, and then things will plateau eventually,” this person said, adding: “We know that a lot of these mandates coming out are supposed to shock us into submission or try to get us to leave our jobs. That’s the whole point of all this is to shank the government and to take out its workers.”
“And so a lot of us are going to stay out of spite,” this person added. “We’re here for however long we want to be here. I could be here until retirement in 30 years. The Trump administration is only here for four. So there’s been this newfound hope where people are going to stick together, we’re going to advocate for one another, and we’re going to stay here and do our job and serve the public.”
EXPLAINED: Understanding one of the most chaotic, controversial title showdowns in F1 history
December 13, 2021
In some ways, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that a remarkable see-sawing title fight was settled by a remarkable see-sawing finale. After 1,296 laps, it all turned on the 1,297th and final. For two hours, Lewis Hamilton was on course for an unparalleled eighth title. But one lap from the end, one lap from history, it all swung – and it was Max Verstappen who emerged triumphant in both the race and the championship.
Make no mistake, Verstappen deserved this title. But so too did Lewis. Both men drove sublimely all year, their level never dipping below phenomenal. But one man had to win – and one had to lose. Why, then, was the manner in which that happened so controversial? Why did it produce such ill-feeling and rancour that the stewards were involved? And where does the sport go from here?
As Verstappen kept repeating after clinching his first crown, only one word summed it up – ‘insane’. We break down what happened on a night that will now forever be etched into F1 history…
Hamilton in control – until a twist
After a strong Saturday for Verstappen, Sunday started in the best possible fashion for Hamilton. Taking the lead on the medium tyre – and retaining it on the first lap despite Red Bull disputing the fact he cut Turn 7 – meant he was in the box seat.
Hamilton beat his rival off the line and controlled much of the race
The first lap looked ever-more crucial as Hamilton comfortably extended his lead, and even some incredible defending from an off-strategy Sergio Perez (who was called a “legend” by Verstappen for his work) didn’t derail what looked like serene progress to the title.
Verstappen made a pit stop for fresh hard tyres under a Virtual Safety Car when Antonio Giovinazzi stopped on track, but still couldn’t get the gap to Hamilton under 10 seconds. And then Nicholas Latifi hit the wall at Turn 14 and everything changed.
What options did race control have when Latifi crashed?
There were just five full laps remaining when Latifi spun in the dirty air behind Mick Schumacher, with his damaged car sitting right on the racing line on the exit of Turn 14. A Safety Car was the bare minimum that race control could turn to.
A VSC wasn’t sufficient as the car needed to be removed by crane, and there was also a small brake fire to put out initially.
The other option was to use a red flag and halt the race, as was seen in Azerbaijan when Verstappen suffered a tyre failure. That would have given more time to clear the car away and clean the track, while allowing teams and drivers to change tyres and make repairs before a grid restart for four racing laps.
Latifi’s late duel with Schumacher and subsequent crash changed the course of the race
But the red flag was used in Baku due to the amount of debris and the fact the race wouldn’t restart without it. In Abu Dhabi, a restart was still possible – if admittedly not a certainty – from the moment Latifi crashed.
The restart and why it was so controversial
As had been the case under the VSC, Hamilton was not far enough clear of Verstappen to be able to make a pit stop and emerge ahead, and Red Bull would have done the opposite to Mercedes regardless. So giving up track position wasn’t an option in case the race didn’t restart, and Hamilton had to stay out.
Red Bull then took the opportunity to pit Verstappen for a new set of soft tyres that would be extremely quick if there was a restart, but in doing so, a train of three lapped cars between him and Hamilton before the Safety Car interruption grew to five.
With the laps counting down while the car was cleared, allowing all lapped cars to overtake the Safety Car and get safely clear of the pack before a restart – a standard procedure in F1 – became less and less realistic, so the teams were told by race control that no cars would be allowed to un-lap themselves in order to ensure the race could resume.
The Safety Car initially had Hamilton in the lead, with back markers between him and the Red Bull
But with the track clear as the Safety Car-led pack started the penultimate lap, race control then decided to let selected cars – the five between Hamilton and Verstappen in first and second respectively – un-lap themselves.
At this point, Mercedes thought they’d won the title, because the regulations state that after cars are allowed to overtake the Safety Car, the Safety Car will come in at the end of the following lap (i.e. at the end of the final lap, so there would be just one racing corner).
Instead, race control decided to bring the Safety Car in immediately, to ensure the Grand Prix could finish with an entire racing lap.
HIGHLIGHTS: Relive Hamilton and Verstappen’s dramatic fight in the Abi Dhabi GP
The final lap
That decision meant Verstappen started the final lap directly behind Hamilton and on much fresher, quicker soft tyres. DRS was also disabled due to the restart, so he quickly took advantage by bravely diving down the inside of Hamilton into Turn 5 to take the lead.
With better grip he could pull off such a move, and then he cleverly knew he’d have far more traction onto the pair of back straights, giving him a better chance of defending. Once he held Hamilton off at Turn 6 and again at Turn 9, he had it won and pulled away in the final sector.
Once some of the lapped cars went through, it was Hamilton versus Verstappen
Why were Mercedes so upset?
Mercedes protested on two fronts straight after the race, with the first relating to Verstappen’s driving behind the Safety Car. As Hamilton backed the pack up before a restart, Verstappen edged ahead a few times when trying not to be caught out. The margins were tiny, but Mercedes saw an opportunity to try and argue a rule was broken.
In reality, that was just an extra attempt to try and reverse the final result, with Mercedes feeling particularly hard done by about the way the race was restarted. The wording of the regulations – in their view – suggests either no cars should have been allowed to un-lap themselves, or the whole field should have, and the race finished under Safety Car.
Instead, a selection of cars were told to do so, while Red Bull’s gamble to pit meant Verstappen held the advantage in that scenario.
What did Mercedes say?
“Michael, this isn’t right,” Toto Wolff said to Race Director Michael Masi over team radio before the restart, adding: “No Michael! No Michael, no! That was so not right!” when Verstappen took the lead.
“You need to reinstate the lap before, that’s not right,” Wolff said after the race.
Verstappen took the chequered flag to win the world championship
There was no official comment from the team, with Hamilton’s only response coming over team radio after being passed by Verstappen on the final lap, saying: “This is getting manipulated, man!” to which race engineer Pete Bonnington replied, after Hamilton crossed the line: “I’m just speechless, Lewis. Absolutely speechless.”
What did Red Bull say?
Red Bull celebrated Verstappen’s win and then were called to the stewards over the two protests lodged by Mercedes, both of which were dismissed. Team Principal Christian Horner then stated he felt the right decisions had been made.
“We never wanted to end up in front of the stewards, there was obviously a lot of debate before the race,” Horner said. “As it turns out, it was obviously very different after the race. We don’t go racing with barristers and so on – it was a shame it ended up there but the stewards made the right call.
“We have talked about ‘let them race’; Niki Lauda [Mercedes’ late Non-Executive Chairman] was the guy who pushed hard for it and we’ve always talked about not finishing racing under Safety Cars, the Race Director in difficult circumstances made absolutely the right call and strategically we got it right.
Celebrations followed for the Dutchman as he grabbed a maiden title
“We needed the intervention from the racing gods and thank you very much Nicholas Latifi. The Safety Car came at a crucial moment in the championship. It was an important strategy call. The other discussions are a distraction.
“Mercedes made a mistake by not pitting with the Safety Car. We made the right call, [Max] made it work, we used it to our advantage, he made the pass, he’s the world champion.”
READ MORE: ‘It was an emotional rollercoaster’ says Horner after thrilling Verstappen title win
Where do we go from here?
Mercedes have a decision to make on whether they will push ahead with an appeal against the decisions. They lodged their intention to appeal on Sunday night after both protests were dismissed, and have 96 hours from that point to either confirm or withdraw.
Should they proceed, a case would be heard by the FIA International Court of Appeal in the coming weeks, with Red Bull likely to also be present as an interested party.
For F1, a new era has been ushered in over the course of this season. Both drivers deserved to win the championship and the fact that only one could shouldn’t overshadow what a stunning battle they delivered.
Hamilton was gracious in defeat – but it remains to be seen what his team will do next
Verstappen has joined Hamilton as a world champion in a World Championship-calibre team, and prevented him securing a record-breaking eighth title. Until now, Verstappen hasn’t had the car to consistently challenge, so we wait with bated breath to see if the two teams are closely-matched again in 2022, and if they are, then Hamilton will look to prove that this new era isn’t a changing of the guard moment in F1, but more the start of a thrilling rivalry.
A deserving champion
There’s no doubting Verstappen is a deserving world champion, finally getting his hands on a title that appeared inevitable from the moment he stepped into a race-winning car in 2016. And Hamilton, too, produced a season worthy of the title in any year.
That’s something we should all appreciate about the two drivers that fought wheel-to-wheel – inches apart – on the very final lap of the very final race.
At times they got too close, but that was a sign of how hard each was pushing the other. And that battle took them to incredible heights and delivered one of the most sensational seasons in Formula 1 history.
