Advantage Bottas as Lewis double faults
Incredibly fine margins settled this first contest of F1’s delayed 2020 season in favour of Valtteri Bottas over reigning champion Lewis Hamilton, despite Mercedes yet again suffering reliability problems around the brutal Red Bull Ring.
Bottas trailed Hamilton throughout practice but was edging closer each session and eventually beat Lewis to pole by just 0.012s. This was also where Bottas received his first big slice of luck in 2020, and where Hamilton made his first significant mistake. First, Lewis had his initial Q3 lap scrubbed for exceeding track limits at the final corner. Later, Bottas went off at the exit of Turn 4 just in front of Hamilton. Lewis went quicker than his previous ‘illegal’ best under yellow flags, which is forbidden.
Lewis seemed to have gotten away with it after a stewards’ review, in which he claimed he was confused by conflicting yellow and green lights, but Red Bull drew attention to Hamilton’s onboard camera footage, which convinced officials Hamilton had ignored a clear signal to slow.
Having failed with an earlier protest of Mercedes’ Dual-axis Steering system, this time Red Bull succeeded, and Hamilton was demoted three places on the grid. Lucky for him the rules bizarrely don’t also stipulate deletion of laptimes set under yellows…
But such was the W11’s advantage – more than half a second over Max Verstappen’s third-placed Red Bull in qualifying – it didn’t take long for Hamilton to recover, helped by a mechanical problem on Max’s car that compromised the electrics, putting Mercedes’ main external threat out early on.
Having easily cleared Verstappen’s team-mate Alex Albon – running an inferior front wing after getting ‘Mark Webbered’ when Verstappen broke his own on Friday – plus Lando Norris’s overachieving Mclaren, Hamilton closed Bottas down. This was Hamilton at his best: turning the screw, refusing to give up, asking questions, applying pressure. But just as the race was heating up, Mercedes stepped in to shut things down, telling both drivers their cars were suffering “critical” gearbox problems – electrical
“noise” the engineers called it – from vibrations through the rear suspension caused by riding kerbs. Lewis questioned this, but eventually backed off.
Then came another significant error of judgement from Hamilton. Albon secured a softer tyre advantage pitting behind the Safety Car deployed after George Russell’s Williams lost fuel pressure, while the Mercedes stayed out on used hard Pirellis. Feeling sure he would now win, Albon attacked Hamilton around the outside at Turn 4 after the final restart. Lewis clipped the RB16’S rear wheel and spun it around while trying to defend. You could argue ‘racing incident’, as Toto Wolff did, and that Albon should have shown patience, but it looked bad for Lewis as Norris and Charles Leclerc avoided contact in a similar situation, despite Norris locking up.
Fine margins again. Lewis received a five-second penalty, which demoted him to fourth. Fernando Alonso reckons Hamilton’s main weakness is that he tends to start seasons slowly. Over to Bottas, then, to build on this unexpected but welcome boon.
not 1st 2nd 4th 5th 6th 8th 9th 10th 11th 13th
Valtteri Bottas Mercedes 1h30m55.739s +2.700s +5.491s +5.689s* +8.903s +15.092s** Alphatauri +16.682s
Esteban Ocon Renault +17,456s
Antonio Giovinazzi Alfa Romeo +21.146s
Sebastian Vettel Ferrari +24.545s
Nicholas Latifi Williams +31.650s Alphatauri +2 laps/suspension
Alexander Albon Red Bull +4 laps/electrical
Charles Leclerc Ferrari
Lando Norris Mclaren
Lewis Hamilton Mercedes
Carlos Sainz Mclaren
Sergio Pérez Racing Point