Hamilton had his mind set on Hockenheim retirement
● World champion feeling effects of virus ● Kyvat on cloud nine after podium finish
Lewis Hamilton told Mercedes to retire him from the German Grand Prix.
In a radio message which was not aired during Sunday’s broadcast, Hamilton urged his team to pull him out of the race with 11 laps remaining.
Afterrunningofftheroadfor a second time on a mistakeridden afternoon at Hockenheim, Hamilton was 13th, and set to drop to last ahead of a sixth pit stop, when he made the call. Mercedes, however, instructed him to continue.
“Okay, Lewis box, box for new soft tyres,” said the Briton’s race engineer Pete Bonnington on lap 53.
“Retire the car,” Hamilton replied.
“Negative, Lewis, negative,” said Bonnington. “There are always opportunities.”
Hamilton would take the chequered flag in 11th. He was later promoted two places after both Alfa Romeo drivers were hit with time penalties for a technical infringement.
That would earn Hamilton two points to extend his championship lead over Valtteri Bottas to 41 points following the Finn’s late crash on a miserable afternoon for Mercedes at their home event.
Hamilton had led for almost half the race before he crashed in the slippery conditions.
The 34-year-old will now spend the next few days at his Monaco home in the hope of recovering from a virus which hindered his preparations in Germany.
“Lewis wasn’t healthy the whole weekend, but I think he did the most he could to get himself in an OK place for the race,” said Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff.
“Many of us wouldn’t have considered being in the car but he did.
“You can’t physically be at your best when you’ve been ill for a few days. Having said that he tried to push through and that needs to be admired.”
Hamilton will be back in action at this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix, the final round before Formula One’s summer break.
Daniil Kvyat, meanwhile, says he feels like he has “lost the chains” of his difficult first period in Formula 1 with his podium at Hockenheim.
The Russian, 25, was sacked from the Red Bull programme at the end of 2017 but re-signed by junior team Toro Rosso this year.
He told the BBC: “It was sometimes tough and I thought maybe F1 was over for me but life just proves if you work hard and never give up, things are possible.”
He added: “These three difficult years just felt like they crashed from my shoulders, finally.”
Kvyat was running out of the points for much of a topsy-turvy, incident-strewn race in wet-dry conditions at Hockenheim, but a late choice to fit slick tyres saw him jump from ninth place to third.
It was Kvyat’s first podium since the 2016 Chinese Grand Prix, when he was driving for Red Bull.
The race after that, his home event in Russia, Kvyat was involved in a first-corner crash with Vettel – his second in two races – and was then demoted back to Toro Rosso in a swap for Max Verstappen, who was the winner in Germany.
After a difficult season and a half for Toro Rosso, Kvyat was dropped by the team after crashing out of the 2017 Singapore Grand Prix, reinstated for the US Grand Prix two races later when the team found themselves without a driver, and then dropped from the Red Bull programme altogether.
But after a year as Ferrari development driver in 2018, Kvyat was re-signed by Red Bull for Toro Rosso because they had run out of drivers in their junior programme to promote.
Kvyat said of the race in Germany: “It was a horror movie with a black comedy. At some point I thought the race was done for me, but then it came alive again, it was an incredible rollercoaster. A bit like my whole career!”
He added: “It was an incredible few years in my life. Maybe I thought, especially a podium, I would never ever have it again. But life just proves that if you work hard and never give up, things are possible.”