From the Spanish and Monaco GPS
1 Déjà vu for Verstappen as Hamilton snatches victory
A counter-intuitive two-stop strategy enabled Lewis Hamilton to catch and pass Max Verstappen after ceding the lead of the Spanish Grand Prix at the start – on a circuit where track position is king and processional racing is the norm. From second on the grid, Verstappen made a good start and asserted himself in a typically aggressive move into the first corner.
Ordinarily in Barcelona that would have been that barring incidents or potential undercuts around the pitstops, but two key factors enabled Mercedes to execute a virtual repeat of the 2019 Hungarian GP, where Lewis made an extra pitstop and was able to hunt Max down for the win. Firstly, while both started on Pirelli’s soft tyres, Hamilton had two further sets of mediums while Verstappen could only count on one, having used his other set in FP3.
Secondly, and crucially, both drivers’ teammates were in absentia, facilitating a huge gap behind the lead duo which gave Hamilton flexibility for a second stop. At the Hungaroring in 2019 Verstappen’s former team-mate Pierre Gasly qualified and finished a distant sixth while Valtteri Bottas had a scrappy race, picking up damage from impacts with Hamilton and Charles Leclerc. This time around it was Sergio Pérez leaving Verstappen to fly solo, qualifying eighth and spending the opening phase sixth, bottled up behind the Mclaren of Daniel Ricciardo. Bottas made a decent start but was mugged by Leclerc’s Ferrari around the outside of Turn 3 in a move he said he didn’t see coming. As the leaders broke clear Bottas then failed to get back past the Ferrari.
In fairness, Pérez was suffering shoulder pain on Saturday but his absence from the leading battle was noted by his team-mate and his boss. “In the end I am always alone in the fight,” complained Max. “They can easily just make another stop because there is a gap behind them.”
“We need him [Pérez] to be in that gap,” said Red Bull team principal Christian Horner, “so Mercedes don’t have the strategic options they had.”
Hamilton was beginning to put Verstappen under a lot of pressure when Max – misunderstanding a radio communication – broke for the pits at the end of lap 24. The crew, expecting him a lap later, didn’t have all the new wheels in place. Despite a slow stop, Verstappen was quick enough on his out-lap to prompt Mercedes not to mirror his strategy.
“We would have dropped out just behind him and had a repeat of the [first] stint,” said Merc’s director of trackside engineering, Andrew Shovlin. “When you can’t take position, you look to get an offset.”
Mercedes engineered that offset by leaving Hamilton out for another four laps before pitting him for fresh mediums, knowing it had another set in the pocket. Hamilton duly charged back
onto Verstappen’s tail and stayed there for nine laps before pitting again at the end of lap 42. Verstappen had taken life out of his tyres fighting to stay ahead and now he could ill afford to pit again as he would be vunerable to the undercut.
Hamilton’s only obstacle to catching Verstappen again was his own team-mate. Bottas wasn’t very obliging but Lewis made short work of him and then breezed past Max with DRS at the beginning of lap 60, completing the strategic checkmate.
2 Ferrari and Mclaren rekindle spirit of 2008
They may not be doing so at the very front of the grid but Ferrari and Mclaren are locked in combat again, if only for best-of-the-rest status. Ferrari’s SF21 seems capable of a decent turn of speed in single-lap pace and over a race distance, and in Charles Leclerc’s hands it again delivered a finishing position behind the Mercedes and a Red Bull.
Leclerc’s opportunistic pass on Bottas at the race start for third place was audacious and mighty. He was unable to eke out a one-stop strategy, though, and was rather let off the hook when Pérez, who might have challenged him for fourth, pitted at the end of lap 57. Next time around Leclerc swooped in, the Ferrari crew did the honours, and Leclerc preserved his advantage to the flag.
Team-mate Carlos Sainz qualified sixth but shipped two places on the opening lap – one to Mclaren’s Daniel Ricciardo – which forced him to
commit to a two-stopper, such was the tightness of the midfield battle. Ricciardo just held off Sainz for sixth place at the flag, by less than a second.
Lando Norris had a lower-profile race to eighth behind Sainz, but he was able to pass Esteban Ocon, who was hamstrung by Alpine’s persistence with a one-stop strategy.
3 Aston Martin pulls the two-stop-pin too early
It was another frustrating weekend for the team formerly known as Racing Point as both Lance Stroll and Sebastian Vettel struggled to reach the fringes of the top 10. Neither made it to Q3, qualifying 11th and 13th respectively, and they were among the earliest to pit, coming in at the end of lap 21 (Vettel) and 22 (Stroll) while still on the cusp of points positions.
They were in again on laps 38 and 39 having still not quite cracked the top 10, committing them to long stints to the chequered flag. On lap 60 Stroll made it to the head of the DRS train battling for 10th, as Alpine’s Fernando Alonso gave up on his two-stopper and headed for the pits. But immediately he came under attack from the Alphatauri of Pierre Gasly, who was on tyres eight laps fresher. Thus the green cars ended the race where they started, in 11th and 13th.