1 Mercedes finds its mojo again to thwart Red Bull challenge
If Red Bull’s surprise victory in the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix appeared to have crowbarred open the door to teams other than Mercedes winning races this season, the German giant and star driver Lewis Hamilton slammed it shut again in Spain. Barcelona’s unusual mid-august calendar slot brought the kind of sweltering ambients which have exposed Mercedes’ weaknesses in previous rounds, but the nature of Hamilton’s victory suggested those vulnerabilities have been eliminated.
“Sunday evening [of the second Silverstone round] the work started to overcome that problem,” said team boss Toto Wolff after Hamilton completely dominated the Spanish Grand Prix from pole position.
It helped that Red Bull was unable to repeat its tactic of starting Max Verstappen on a harder tyre compound. Practice had suggested the soft tyre was fragile as usual, and the medium was a decent race tyre, while the hardest was gripless and not worth bothering with. Pirelli predicted a two-stop race of soft-medium-medium would be the best, and the only drivers beginning the race on the medium did so from outside the top 10.
Although Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas annexed the front row, Bottas was swamped on the run down to Turn 1 and passed by both Verstappen and Lance Stroll, whose super-committed run down the inside line forced Bottas to lift briefly, baulking the second Red Bull of Alex Albon. Bottas had to hang it out all the way around the outside of Turn 3 to avoid being passed by Stroll’s team-mate Sergio Pérez, who had made a sub-optimal getaway from fourth on the grid.
This phase of the race proved critical as Hamilton moved into overt tyre-management mode, running slowly enough for Verstappen to remain close (and for Max’s engineer to remind him to hang back), while Bottas took until lap five to relieve Stroll of third. Buoyed by being faster on the medium rubber during Friday practice, and confident Mercedes would have to get off the soft tyres sooner rather than later, Red Bull was content to let Max wait.
That confidence evaporated on lap 10, when Hamilton abruptly lifted his pace by 1.5s per lap and bolted for the horizon. Verstappen couldn’t keep up. Lap 16, the point at which Pirelli expected the frontrunners to make their first pitstops, came and went. Hamilton was by now in dialogue with his engineers about whether it would be possible to convert to a one-stop.
Mercedes elected not to take that risk and brought Lewis in for mediums at the end of lap 23, two laps after Max. Crucially, both emerged ahead of the two Racing Points, which were running long first stints (Pérez was on a one-stopper). Hamilton simply drove away into the distance as Verstappen capitulated, making the timing of their second stops academic. Bottas switched to softs for his final stint but was unable to close in on the Red Bull.
“Towards the middle of that first stint, when Lewis started to pick up the pace, I couldn’t really follow so I knew that that was it for today,” said Max. “I thought, ‘I’m just going to manage my race from now on and try to make the best of it.’”