Portuguese GP report and analysis
Valtteri Bottas seemed to have the edge as F1 raced in Portugal for the first time since 1996, but his Mercedes team-mate again found an answer
He didn’t think twice when the time came. He’d homed in on his rival, ratcheted up the pressure, got into the perfect position. As a result, Valtteri Bottas was powerless to resist Lewis Hamilton’s attack, armed with DRS, down the Algarve International Circuit’s main straight at the start of lap 20 of 66 in last Sunday’s Portuguese Grand Prix. Bottas refused to cede the inside line, stealing onto the dusty asphalt very close to the pitwall, but it was never going to be enough. Hamilton was through, his record-clinching 92nd Formula 1 victory in sight. Hamilton had clinically lined up that decisive move for the lead, but he’d actually struck the blow that did for Bottas ahead of qualifying. But, well before the events of what was ultimately the race-winning move played out, Mercedes had found itself in a position that took the team back 71 Hamilton wins – to an era of a different livery, driver line-up and team management: behind a Mclaren on merit.
Hamilton had made a straightforward getaway from pole, but Bottas – starting on the less grippy right-hand side of the grid away from the racing line – was slow away. He fell behind Max Verstappen on the run to the fast, sweeping right of Turn 1, but recovered well at the next two turns, muscling the Red Bull off the track and back down to third.
As the Mercedes shot into what looked like very familiar territory at the head of the pack, Verstappen was about to have his second shunt of the weekend, following his collision with Lance Stroll in FP2. After being firmly manoeuvred off the track by Bottas at the exit of the tight left at Turn 3, Verstappen lost momentum and found himself under attack from Racing Point’s Sergio Perez as they ran through the tricky uphill left of Turn 4. The pair collided as the Mexican moved ahead around the outside, which spun Perez around and off to the side of the track, dropping him to the back of the pack.
Really not very far up ahead, things were about to get unexpectedly tough for Hamilton. He had arrived at the Turn 5 hairpin, where several drivers had locked up on their recce laps to the grid, struggling in what were much cooler and blustery conditions compared to the rest of the weekend. Here, with light rain now falling, Hamilton snatched his right-front wheel, locking up and going deep, but staying ahead.
Then he was behind. He’d had to save a massive oversteer moment as he ran onto even damper asphalt through the left-hand kink of Turn 6 and, after gathering things up, he opted to take a careful approach to the technical Turns 7 and 8. The Mercedes braked so early it caught out the rapid-starting Carlos Sainz Jr, which let Bottas past and left Hamilton vulnerable to the Mclaren’s attack.
“We knew it was going to be tough on the mediums [ at the start],” said Hamilton afterwards. “actually, the engineers, they’re very kind of chilled about it:‘ yeah, it will be tough but you’ll be all right.’ It was very tricky and obviously it started to spit, so when you’re the first car into the corners at the start of a lap when it is spitting, you’re the first one to hit those raindrops, the first one to hit those patches.
“Valtteri came by, I was overly cautious, I would say, through
Turn 7 and kind of just generally let them by into Turn 8 – didn’t even defend. He seemed to have more grip than me at that moment. I didn’t understand why, but I was sure that at some stage I would get there and I knew that it’s a long race. So, I just kept my cool and focused on trying to keep the car on the track.”
As Hamilton was doing that, he wasn’t staring at the rear of Sainz’s car for long, for the Spaniard, who had benefited from putting “a lot of emphasis on the warm-up lap ”to ensure his soft tyres were operating perfectly right from the off, charged after and past Bottas. He got
ahead with better traction out of the Turn 5 hairpin on the second lap, and proceeded to pull away from the Mercedes pair, who were still struggling to get their medium tyres up to temperature.
“Obviously I was very happy with the start and the first laps in the rain and the mixed conditions, ”said Sainz of what was to be a cameo appearance at the front.“i knew as soon as the track dried that it was going to be impossible to maintain the lead.”
And so it proved to be. By lap five, the Mercedes drivers had reached the low 1m23s (Hamilton actually did a 1m22.996s), and on lap six Bottas used DRS to get alongside and past Sainz on the outside run into the first corner. Hamilton was able to blast ahead one tour later, and Sainz, soon to be struggling with graining on his previously helpful soft rubber, slipped back behind Verstappen and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc. In the other Mclaren, Lando Norris had also surged forwards at the start, rising to fourth ahead of Verstappen, but also subsequently fell back with graining softs. His race was ruined by a clash with Stroll, for which the Racing Point driver was penalised.
Bottas’s lead over Hamilton at the end of lap seven was 1.689 seconds, but it grew only as large as 2.354s over the next 13 laps. The medium tyres were finally working – and ultimately worked so well that the rubber’s longevity surprised Mercedes – but Hamilton was lurking menacingly. On lap 15, the world champion unleashed a 1m21.421s, at that stage the race’s fastest lap. He closed in quickly on his team-mate, taking in a pair of 1m21.3s, then lined up the pass once he’d got within DRS range at the end of lap 18 and pulled it off next time down the main straight.
Bottas had been undone by his performance on the medium tyres, but he had no explanation for why he had lacked pace compared to his team-mate after appearing so strong earlier in the weekend.
“I was pretty pleased to get the lead ,”he said. “to be honest, after that I just didn’t have the pace, and I don’t understand why – no pace whatsoever. Of course, I tried to defend when Lewis came closer, but there was nothing I could do. I was pushing hard but I couldn’t go faster.”
This was the key difference that decided where the victory near Portimao would go. The lower temperatures, allied to the slippery and tricky new track surface, meant the key to doing well in the race was keeping up the temperature on every compound, particularly the
“I DIDN’T HAVE THE PACE. THERE WAS NOTHING I COULD DO. I WAS PUSHING HARD BUT I COULDN’T GO FASTER”
medium and hard tyres. In qualifying, it had just been about reaching this critical point, but the race was about maintaining that heat in the rubber. And, it seems, Bottas just couldn’t do it as well as Hamilton.
“The medium tyre is difficult to get to work but it seemed like some others had much better warm-up than we did ,”explained Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin. “valtteri did really well to take the position back off Verstappen after losing it off the line. It was a nice move into Turn 3 and once he’d got some temperature in the tyres he was able to pass the Mclaren and drove a well-managed first stint.
“He started to drop a bit of temperature in his tyres around 10 laps into the stint, which was making the car inconsistent. Lewis at that point had a bit of pace in hand and was able to make the pass.”
Hamilton explained afterwards, having revealed that he’d debated internally during the race’s closing laps how much of his secret to winning in Portugal he was going to give away, that he’d taken a key decision ahead of qualifying to make sure he could maintain tyre heat.
“It was all about temperatures today and that’s something I was able to [do] with the set-up – I was able to pre-empt it, ”he said after climbing from his W11. “IT was less about qualifying set-up, and more for the race set-up and I think today that enabled me to go one better [than Bottas].”
Shovlin also revealed a set-up tweak that went on both Mercedes cars meant using a different higher-downforce wing level, but said the key difference between the pair involved their overall approach to car balance. “[hamilton] got the balance of the car to sort of use the tyres and not be too hard on either end,” said Shovlin.
But the race wasn’t quite over by this point. In fact, the
Mercedes drivers were only halfway through what would turn out to be their first of two stints.
Merce des had told Hamilton to keep“stretching” his time on the mediums, and he did so comfortably. Over the 20 tours from taking the lead to finally coming in at the end of lap 40, Hamilton pulled
9.577s clear of Bottas, going an average 0.495s per lap quicker.
The Briton took on hard tyres at his stop, with Bottas mirroring this at the end of the next lap. But that hadn’t been the rubber he’d had in mind, reasoning that doing something different was his only chance.
When informed of Hamilton’s switch to the hard tyres, Bottas asked “in that case, maybe we take the soft?”–“because I thought it would be, for me, the best thing to do”. Mercedes, however, disagreed, putting him onto identical white-walled rubber to Hamilton, with what team boss Toto Wolff called “pretty robust” reasoning.
“We were pretty convinced that the hard was the better tyre,” said Wolff. “all data that we’ve seen from cars out there tended towards the hard outperforming the medium and the soft. The soft didn’t function at all – it was actually the weakest tyre at the end of the race.”
Bottas knew he’d be getting the hard rubber when he came in, with Mercedes’ chief strategist, James Vowles, coming on the radio to
“I WAS LEARNING, TRYING LOTS OF DIFFERENT LINES AND DISCOVERING NEW LINES THAT WORKED WELL”
explain that he’d also had to consider the vibrations Bottas had reported towards the end of the long opening stint, although this could also have been a coded explanation as to why the softs where not appropriate. Given how some others struggled on the soft rubber in the closing stages, Mercedes was probably correct.
“I didn’t really have any big lock-ups so I think it was just that it’s quite common that when a tyre starts to be at the end of its life, it starts vibrating,” explained Bottas, seeming to accept the decision not to give him an alternative tyre strategy for the end. “it was really just the tyre wear and that forced us to stop at that point.”
Still the race was not over. Both Mercedes drivers now faced another tyre temperature-related problem: how to get the hardest compound in Pirelli’s range into the right window. Their out-laps, with the DAS
systems at play, were 1m46.585s (Hamilton) and 1m47.899s (Bottas). For comparison, Verstappen had done a 1m45.057s on his, 17 laps before Hamilton stopped. Bottas also lost time having to navigate the tricky pitlane exit, which fed the cars back into the racing line for that version of the Algarve Circuit’s first corner, as the lapped Antonio Giovinazzi and George Russell came flying past. That put him in traffic too.
Inevitably, Hamilton fired his hards up faster, and roared even further away from Bottas, ultimately finishing with a winning margin of 25.592s, completing the second stint at an average lap time of 1m20.044s. This was, on average, 0.563s better than Bottas could manage each time around, with Hamilton setting the race’s fastest lap at 1m18.750s on the 63rd tour, entering a lap time bracket that Bottas was unable to reach all race.
“I felt through the race that I was learning, lap on lap, more about the circuit,”said Hamilton, who had to manage the final tours with “excruciating” pain in his right calf from cramp caused by dehydration.
“I was trying lots of different lines and discovering new lines that worked well. The wind direction was very tricky – lots of crosswinds, headwinds and tailwinds – and there were some positions that you could utilise to your favour and others that kind of get in the way. I just felt like I was generally getting faster and faster throughout the race, but I had to keep up the pace for these tyres. That was really the key.”
Behind the two Black Arrows came Verstappen, for the third time in 2020. He’d not been penalised for his part in the collision with Perez, saying the Mexican“took himself out while I was just driving on the normal line”, as the stewards opted not to even investigate the incident. Had it happened later in the race, and not at the point where officials treat incidents more leniently, F1 race director Michael Masi said it was“highly likely”that things might have been viewed differently.
But as it was, Verstappen was free to chase after the Mercedes duo once he’d seen off the Mclarens (and also after he’d defended robustly against the other first-lap star, Alfa Romeo’s Kimi Raikkonen, with a very firm move on the exit of the hairpin on the second tour). But it was quickly clear his chase was in vain.