HAMILTON BACK ON TRACK
Mercedes driver retakes championship lead after dominating win in France
FORMULA One champion Lewis Hamilton won the French Grand Prix for Mercedes AMG Petronas yesterday to retake the overall lead from Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel, who finished fifth after a first lap collision.
The victory was the 65th of Hamilton’s F1 career but the Briton’s first in France, which was returning to the calendar after a 10-year absence, and continued a triumphant day for English sports fans.
“Great work guys! I’m so happy for England as well,” he said over the team radio, referring to the national football team’s 6-1 World Cup rout of Panama in Russia. “It’s a beautiful Sunday, everyone.”
Hamilton, who had started on pole position, now leads Vettel by 14 points after eight of 21 races. The Briton has 145 and German 131.
Red Bull’s Dutch 20-year-old Max Verstappen took the chequered flag in second place with Kimi Raikkonen completing the podium for Ferrari and Australian Daniel Ricciardo finishing fourth for Red Bull.
Hamilton had never before won in France and his victory at Le Castellet, a southern circuit that last hosted Formula One in 1990, set a record for the most wins at different grands prix.
He had shared the record of 22 with retired seven-times world champion Michael Schumacher. He also extended his record of wins at different circuits to 26.
There was drama at the start as Hamilton and Mercedes teammate Valtteri Bottas lined up on the front row with Vettel just behind in third.
Vettel and Bottas collided as they jostled for position, with the German handed a five-second penalty for causing the collision.
The incident dropped both to the back of the field after pitstops while the safety car was deployed for four laps with debris scattered across the track from other accidents.
Two of the three French drivers retired on the spot, with Force India’s Esteban Ocon and Toro Rosso’s Pierre Gasly the unlucky casualties.
Vettel returned to the pits for a new front wing while Bottas limped back on three wheels and a rim with the remains of the tyre flailing.
Denmark’s Kevin Magnussen finished sixth for the Haas team, with Bottas seventh and Carlos Sainz eighth for Renault after losing two places three laps from the end when his car lost power.
Renault’s Nico Hulkenberg took ninth place with Monaco rookie Charles Leclerc a fine 10th for Sauber and denying Haas’s French driver Romain Grosjean his first point of the season.
• FORCE India have been fined €100,000 (RM467,000), with €85,000 of the total suspended for a year, after a rear wheel flew off Sergio Perez’s Formula One car at speed in French Grand Prix practice.
The team were also told by stewards on Saturday to investigate their assembly and quality control procedures to ensure such a potentially dangerous accident did not happen again.
Stewards said in a statement that the problem had been caused by an assembly fault rather than any incorrect or incomplete fitment of the wheel.
They also cleared the left rearwheel gun operator of blame and agreed that neither the team nor the driver had any advance warning that there was a problem.
“It would be unreasonable to infer that the team did not take ‘appropriate action’ to stop the car because it had no way of knowing of the problem,” they said in a statement.
“Accordingly, and consistent with previous decisions this year, the stewards decided that the grid-place penalty that ‘may’ be imposed... would not be applied.”
However they also noted that it was the third such incident involving the team in the past two years and the second this season.
“Hence the usual penalty has been significantly increased,” they said, adding that they hoped the size of the fine would act as a deterrent. The suspended €85,000 will be payable if there is a repeat in the next 12 months.
Force India, co-owned by troubled Indian businessman Vijay Mallya, have one of the sport’s smallest budgets and had cashflow problems earlier in the year, making the sanction particularly painful.