2020 70th ANNIVERSARY GP

RED BULL RB16 STARTED 4th

There was one element of Verstappen’s 2020 campaign that really stood out. This was how, on so many occasions when Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas were unleashing the Mercedes W11’s full might, only he could keep them in sight – armed with the inferior Red Bull RB16.

That scenario played out at F1’s muted 70th Anniversary celebration amid the height of the pandemic keeping crowds away from Silverstone. But there was a critical difference here: Verstappen caught, passed and beat the Black Arrows pair.

He did so in part thanks to Red Bull getting him through Q2 on the hard tyres. Back then, your Q2 rubber was what you started on, and this was the best race tyre on a weekend when Pirelli had brought a compound range a step softer than those so famously tested in the British GP one week earlier. That gave Verstappen a strategic edge when the early safety car Mercedes had feared never arrived, and Verstappen had quickly jumped Racing Point supersub Nico Hulkenberg.

Once the Mercedes drivers had pitted out of his way to shed the medium tyres, Verstappen attacked. After so amusingly rebuffing Red Bull’s call to back off from Hamilton early in the first stint with his

“I’m not just sitting behind like a grandma” quip, he actually lapped quicker than his rivals even as his ageing hards wore further.

He jumped Hamilton when he did finally pit, and would have got Bottas too but for a slightly slow Red Bull service. No matter, Verstappen was past in three more out-lap corners. The Mercedes was just unable to be pushed on the hards through a combination of its huge downforce levels eating into the fragile Pirellis in Silverstone’s fast corners, the day’s scorching temperatures, and the raising of tyre pressures to avert further blowouts after the incidents of the previous weekend.

From there, Verstappen romped clear, pulling away when back on the hards for his third stint (in between, he’d taken the same medium compound the Mercedes pair had unsuccessfully worked hard to protect in the first stint) to win by 11.3s over Hamilton. Bottas fell back, rueing his shorter middle stint.