THE BRITISH GP IN 3 KEY MOMENTS
1 Bottas defeats himself regardless of Safety Car intervention
History will record that Lewis Hamilton claimed his sixth British Grand Prix victory – eclipsing Jim Clark’s 52-year-old record – by a 24.9s margin from his Mercedes team-mate Valtteri Bottas. But an already entertaining race could have been even closer had a third party not got involved at the crucial moment, enabling Hamilton to maximise the advantage of only making one pitstop.
It was Bottas who secured pole position with his first Q3 effort on a blustery Saturday. His second flying lap might have been even quicker but he fluffed it early on. Hamilton, desperate to perform in front of his adoring home crowd, fell 0.006s short.
Bottas made no mistakes getting away from the line on Sunday, converting pole seamlessly into the race lead in the teeth of continued challenges from his very determined team-mate. Running on medium-compound Pirellis, both Mercedes stretched away from a chasing pack led initially by Charles Leclerc’s soft-shod Ferrari.
Leclerc qualified within a tenth of Bottas and had an edge on both Mercedes during Q2. On race pace the silver cars were too strong, though, and Leclerc had too much going on in his mirrors to challenge.
Bottas defended well early on but keeping the crowd on its toes was taking its toll on his tyres. Hamilton’s engineer Peter Bonnington advised his charge that the leading car’s front-left was “opening up” and the world champion hung back, waiting for his plan to come together. On lap 16, earlier than planned, Bottas dived into the pits for another set of mediums and Hamilton moved ahead.
Bottas was marginally quicker with fresher tyres and would probably have regained the lead when Hamilton pitted, though that was not how it panned out. As Alfa Romeo’s Antonio Giovinazzi came to the end of his 19th lap a wheel rim failure spun him into the Vale gravel. Hamilton pitted for hard tyres under the ensuing Safety Car, theoretically enabling him to run to the end if he could make them last, while Bottas would have to stop a second time.
Hamilton emerged in the lead and never surrendered it – and broke the lap record on his last time around. It later emerged the drivers themselves had suggested an offset strategy in which whoever was second would take the hard compound rather than the medium at the first stop. Bottas therefore authored his own defeat…
2 Vettel’s season goes from bad to worse
Sebastian Vettel’s burgeoning reputation for choking at crucial moments gained further momentum as he made heavy weather of qualifying and then picked up a penalty in the race for a clumsy challenge on Max Verstappen’s Red Bull.
Viewed from trackside, Vettel never looked quite as committed as his Ferrari team-mate Charles Leclerc. Not only did he qualify three places behind Leclerc in sixth, he barely improved his time from Q1 to Q3, saying, “I struggled to extract what was in the car. I couldn’t get the right feel, I’m not happy.”
Vettel got by the second Red Bull of Pierre Gasly away from the start, but then fell behind again after
catching the Leclerc-verstappen battle for third and being briefly held up as they squabbled at The Loop on lap 11. That enabled Gasly to latch back onto his tail and claim the inside line into Village next time around, a move that seemed to catch Vettel by surprise.
Gasly then pitted for a second set of mediums, prompting Verstappen and Leclerc to stop as well, and when the latter two stopped again under the Safety Car – Leclerc a lap after his team-mate – Vettel was elevated to third while an irked Leclerc fulminated in sixth.
On lap 27 Red Bull ordered its cars to swap places: Verstappen surged by Gasly into Stowe and
set off in pursuit of Vettel. Ten laps later he blasted past Vettel around the outside in a Drs-assisted move at Stowe, running slightly wide at the exit, enabling Vettel to get back on his tail into Vale.
There Verstappen jinked left as Vettel lunged for the inside, but the move was never really on: there was less than a car’s width available even before Verstappen moved. Vettel swerved in the opposite direction, slammed into the back of the Red Bull under braking and launched it into the air.
Verstappen soldiered on to fifth in a severely damaged car, while the stewards slapped Vettel with a 10s penalty that left him classified 16th. His season simply goes from bad to worse.
3 Leclerc gets feistier in Verstappen rematch
Two weeks after Verstappen sealed victory over Leclerc with a controversial late-race move in Austria, the two young guns found themselves circulating in close company through Silverstone’s fast bends. What could possibly go wrong?
Leclerc qualified third, with Verstappen not much more than a tenth of a second in arrears in fourth, though the margin was exaggerated by the Red Bull suffering pronounced turbo lag in slow corners.
Though Leclerc held on to third at the start, Verstappen harried him through the first stint and emerged from the pits narrowly ahead when they both stopped on lap 13. Verstappen initially struggled on his second set of tyres and ran wide at The Loop on his out-lap, enabling Leclerc to reclaim the initiative. The battle frequently became physical as they brushed wheels and flirted with track limits until their pitstops behind the Safety Car separated them.
“Austria was quite an eye-opener for me in terms of how far we can go and what is accepted,” said Leclerc. “This race was quite fun.”
This is unlikely to be the last salvo in a fight that could run and run in the years to come.