Sportstar

It’s Lewis, who else!

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Three races into the 2020 season, Lewis Hamilton has added two wins to his tally, and F1 has added two races to the calendar and is in discussion­s for more, making the likelihood of Hamilton equalling the two most signicant F1 records this year that much greater.

much greater.

Hamilton underlined that drive — nay, surge — towards greatness with an unchalleng­ed win from pole at the Hungarian Grand Prix and took the lead in the Drivers’ Championsh­ip from Mercedes teammate Valtteri Bottas. At the end of the second triplehead­er — three races in as many weekends — in F1 history, Hamilton leads the standings with 63 points, ve ahead of Bottas and a massive 30 ahead of Red Bull’s Max Verstappen. (To put that in perspectiv­e, a race win gets a driver 25 points.)

But the weekend at the Hungarorin­g was as much about the power of the Mercedes engines as it was about Hamilton. The two Mercedes were rst and second in two of the three practice sessions as well as in qualifying, while the two Mercedespo­wered Racing Point cars were right behind them in each.

Hamilton had such a lead over the rest of the eld — he lapped every other car up to Red Bull’s Alexander Albon in fth place — that he pitted for fresh tyres towards the end of the race just so he could set the fastest lap and take the additional point that comes with it.

Valtteri Bottas, who nished runnerup in the Drivers’ Championsh­ip to Hamilton in 2019, has started this season as he did the last: win the rst race, take second place in the second, lose the championsh­ip lead to Hamilton at the third.

Bottas is ghting not just the odds, but history in the making. The Finn is the only driver able to come close to or match

Hamilton’s blistering speed at the moment — a do of the hat to Mercedes’ power. Nico Rosberg was able to beat Hamilton to the 2016 title 3■5 points to 3■0, but he’d needed some serendipit­ous results — Hamilton retiring from the lead in Malaysia being the best example — to achieve that.

The luck that Bottas needed wasn’t there at the start of the Hungarian Grand Prix as he dropped behind Max Verstappen’s surging Red Bull as well as the Racing Point cars. By the second round of pit stops, Bottas was back up to third and was nearing striking distance of Verstappen with less than 20 laps to go. Mercedes then gambled by pitting Bottas for a third time, hoping his outright speed advantage — the fresh tyres made him well over a second faster per lap than Verstappen — would get him to second place. The gamble didn’t pay o, and neither did it get him the extra point for the fastest lap.

“Max redeemed himself,” Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said after the Hungarian GP, summing up his lead driver’s performanc­e.

The Milton Keynes team had a troubled weekend at the Hungarorin­g, where Verstappen took his rst pole position in F1 last year and nished second. The Dutch prodigy again nished second at the track, but he nearly didn’t start the race — he crashed into the wall at Turn 12 on his way to the grid! It took a masterful performanc­e by his pit crew to get the damaged car ready with less than 30 seconds in hand, a performanc­e both Horner and Verstappen explicitly acknow

ledged after the race.

Verstappen’s own performanc­e can be described as dogged. He had a blistering start to jump from seventh to third and he later took second place from Racing Point’s Lance Stroll during the rst round of pit stops. From then on, it was a matter of holding on to the spot — in a nutshell, holding o Bottas.

In the second Red Bull, Albon had a redemptive race at the end of a dicult weekend where he could only qualify 13th. He, too, had a brilliant start, and the Thaibritis­h driver overtook Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel in the later stages of the race to take fth place in both the race and the drivers’ standings. three seasons. At 26, Vettel was a fourtime world champion. Most wins in a season, most pole positions in a season, most points scored in a season, et cetera, et cetera.

Come 2020, Vettel, at age 33, is without a drive at the end of the season after failing to extend his contract with Ferrari, a team with which he was expected to be the true successor to compatriot Schumacher. Six seasons with the Italian marque have seen two runnerup nishes in the Drivers’ Championsh­ip for Vettel, in 2017 and ’1■. But the frequent racing mistakes in 2019 that ended in fth place in the standings seem to have compounded the German’s decline — juxtaposed against the stellar rise of his Ferrari teammate, Leclerc, who had a miserable race in Hungary and nished 11th.

 ?? AP ?? Going steady: Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton of Britain celebrates after winning the Hungarian Grand Prix at the Hungarorin­g racetrack in Mogyorod.
AP Going steady: Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton of Britain celebrates after winning the Hungarian Grand Prix at the Hungarorin­g racetrack in Mogyorod.
 ?? GETTY IMAGES ?? Redemptive race: Red Bull’s Alexander Albon, who could only qualify 13th, overtook Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel in the later stages of the race to take fth place in both the race and the drivers’ standings.
GETTY IMAGES Redemptive race: Red Bull’s Alexander Albon, who could only qualify 13th, overtook Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel in the later stages of the race to take fth place in both the race and the drivers’ standings.
 ?? REUTERS ?? Cant stop ’em: Formula One fans watch the race from a hill outside the circuit during the Hungarian Grand Prix.
REUTERS Cant stop ’em: Formula One fans watch the race from a hill outside the circuit during the Hungarian Grand Prix.

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