Hamilton wins 50th GP in Texas to close gap on Rosberg
The reigning world champion, who has won four times at Austin to add to his 2007 US GP success at Indianapolis, finished 4.5s ahead of Mercedes teammate Rosberg, with Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo third.
Rosberg’s championship lead has been cut to 26 po-ints over Hamilton, but it could have been more as Ricciardo and team-mate Max Verstappen had a shot at upsetting the Mercedes one-two.
Hamilton and Rosberg made clean starts, although Ricciardo took advantage of the wide first corner to get alongside Rosberg, ultimately completing the pass around the outside through Turn 2.
Verstappen, who passed Kimi Raikkonen on lap 12 to claim fourth, then began to push Rosberg who found himself sandwiched between the Red Bull duo.
But Verstappen’s race unravelled from lap 26 when he mistakenly thought he had been called into the pits, with his crew not ready when he arrived.
Three laps later Versta-ppen suffered a gearbox failure, and he tried to get his car back to the pits rather than stopping trackside.
When he eventually parked up, the virtual safety car was deployed, which gave Mercedes pair Hamilton and Rosberg what Ricciardo described as “a free stop”.
Having stopped for a second time on lap 25, before the VSC, Ricciardo therefore found himself third, losing what Red Bull estimated to be 10 seconds to Rosberg thanks to the VSC.
From that point on the top three positions were sealed, with Ricciardo safe in third as Raikkonen was on a three-stop strategy and had another stop to make.
Raikkonen’s third stop led to the end of his race tho-ugh, as he pulled away too quickly, with the rightrear tyre gun yanked off in the process.
As Raikkonen began to climb up the hill out of the pitlane he was forced to pull over after being told to stop, from where he rolled his car back down the slope and out of harm’s way.
Raikkonen was the fourth retirement of the race, with Force India’s Nico Hulken-berg first out after a Turn 1 collision with Valtteri Bottas in his Williams, sustaining trackrod damage with his car unable to turn left.