‘RACE TWO’ HAMILTON DEFIES BRAKE FIRE TO STEAL BACK THE LEAD
The second‘race’wasn’t just about the start or restarts, although the second grid getaway did play a massive role.
Hamilton arrived in his grid spot of second with his brakes smoking heavily, and they quickly caught fire as he and Bottas waited for the much-reduced pack to form up. Smoke billowed from Hamilton’s car, and flames were clearly visible from his front-right brake.
“On the formation lap I had a separation of my front brake temperatures by nearly two hundred degrees,”he explained.“so I was pushing them very hard to bring the one that was down equal.
And I got them up to a thousand degrees and I tried to cool them through the last corner and all the way to the start.
“I got to the grid and there was a lot of smoke coming and I was definitely worried as I saw a flame at one stage, which is not good, because that burns all the interior of what’s in the upright. Fortunately, the start got under way relatively quickly and I didn’t have a problem from there on, but it was definitely on the limit.”
Hamilton certainly didn’t have a problem, despite the flames. He charged after Bottas, who made a decent getaway from‘pole’.
But as they ran through the rise towards San Donato, Hamilton was all over Bottas, who seemed to lose a touch of momentum at this point. Hamilton stole to the outside, used the heavy camber at the right-hander to stay planted, and went around his rival to steal back the lead. He did not lose it again.
There followed a 34-lap relatively normal‘race’, which was characterised by Bottas’s classic problem compared to his team-mate: tyre-life management. The leaders changed tyres four times in total: twice during red flags, going from used softs to new mediums and then new mediums to used softs; once at the second safety car, to
switch from hards to mediums; and once under green-flag conditions. Between the second start after lap nine and when Bottas came into the pits for his sole green-flag stop of the race on lap 31, the gap generally held at around 1.5s-2.1s as the Mercedes drivers lapped in the high 1m22s or low 1m23s. But the interval had ballooned to 5.713s by lap 30 and continued to increase on Bottas’s in-lap, as he suddenly struggled severely for grip on the medium tyres the Mercedes drivers had fitted at the first red flag. Lapping Grosjean and Raikkonen was also a factor.
Over this stint, Hamilton averaged 1m23.131s versus Bottas’s 1m23.418s, which gave Hamilton his gap to the tune of an average of 0.287s per lap – although this was exacerbated by Bottas’s struggles as the stint wore on.
“Valtteri ran the rubber down to zero, and therefore had vibrations, and we made the safety stop,”mercedes boss Toto Wolff explained.
Bottas took on new hards – after demanding he be given the “opposite”rubber to Hamilton, in the anticipation that he would be brought in second, as is Mercedes’typical strategy when safety is not a factor. Hamilton, who insisted he had tyre life remaining when he came in one tour later, also took the hards and was 7.028s clear at the end of his out-lap. Both were subsequently warned to stay off the kerbs as Mercedes was concerned about further tyre problems.
Bottas did press on here, going 0.135s per lap quicker than Hamilton until the start of lap 43, when he’d just got the gap down to 5.817s and the second race suspension occurred. Stroll, who was chasing Ricciardo after being demoted from third (which he in turn had taken from the powerless, gripless Charles Leclerc on lap 18, after Leclerc had risen in the chaos of the opening lap), crashed. Ricciardo had jumped the Racing Point with an undercut stop, and Albon was closing, when on the 43rd tour Stroll’s race ended violently. A suspected puncture sent him off at high speed into the tyre barriers beyond the second Arrabbiata.
The red flags flew as it became clear that the barriers needed repairing, and Hamilton‘won’the middle‘race’.
In what could well be Formula 1’s only race visit to Mugello, the teams waste no time heading onto the 3.3-mile course in FP1. Even Mercedes and Red Bull abandon their normally relaxed approach to the opening practice, sending their drivers out for immediate sighting laps.
Autosport has wasted a little time with a quick visit to the pit building’s roof to observe the installation laps, briefly confused about why a 2019-Haas-liveried-car is exiting the final corner, but which turns out to be a near-maroon-andgold Ferrari. Then we head out to reach the famous Arrabbiata corners (Turns 8 and 9) early in the track’s second sector.
The sequence does not disappoint. A bump in the middle of Arrabbiata 1 exposes the cars running very low to the ground, with the Red Bulls merrily sparking away through the rapid righthander. The cars lean wide on the exit here as the cornering forces work the downforce massively, the drivers having to hang on to varying degrees. Haas’s
Romain Grosjean seems to be regularly running wider.
The cars nimbly jink from right to left on the approach to Arrabbiata 1, as they sweep down from Savelli, staying wider on the exit kerbs the harder they’re pushing. Generally it looks stable, although Valtteri Bottas has a big wiggle exiting Savelli, but it doesn’t appear to disrupt his progress. In the main the cars look planted across the sequence, but the challenge just to remain calm is clear.
It’s possible that the wind, which gusts heavily at times throughout FP1, is a factor in Bottas’s minor moment, and indeed as the wind increases in the closing stages it seems to push the cars wider through Arrabbiata 1 as the tailwind picks up.
Looking up to Arrabbiata 2, which is a rather steep uphill right, the most notable thing is the speed of direction change.
The turn-in for Arrabbiata 2 is just so fast on push laps – it’s visibly violent.
The moment that sums up the Arrabbiatas’ challenge occurs just past the FP1 half-hour mark, as Lando Norris approaches. The Mclaren driver steams in, carrying way more speed than any other driver throughout opening practice. It does not pay off. From the outside, Norris appears to be skirting perilously close to the edge of the track and the gigantic gravel trap beyond, although his onboard camera footage later indicates that he has slightly more margin than the naked eye suggests. Still, he shoots wide, has to back off massively heading into Arrabbiata 2, and then abandons the lap.
He, and the rest, simply have no room to get it wrong. The Mugello track is a dark-ribbon path – go too far to the outside edge and there’s little chance of staying on it.
“MOST NOTABLE IS THE SPEED OF DIRECTION CHANGE. THE TURN-IN IS VISIBLY VIOLENT”