FIVE KEY TALKING POINTS FROM SILVERSTONE
1. How Lewis Hamiton wrote his name in the stars
History will record that Lewis Hamilton claimed his sixth British Grand Prix victory – eclipsing Jim Clark’s 52-year-old record – by a 24.9s margin from his Mercedes team-mate Valtteri Bottas. But an already entertaining race could have been even closer had a third party not got involved at the crucial moment, enabling Hamilton to maximise the advantage of only making one pitstop.
It was Bottas who secured pole position with his first Q3 effort on a blustery Saturday afternoon. His second flying lap might have been even quicker but he fluffed it early on by losing the rear of his Mercedes. Hamilton, desperate to perform in front of his adoring home crowd, fell 0.006s short.
Starts have been an occasional weak point for Bottas but he made no mistakes getting away from the line on Sunday, converting pole position seamlessly in to the race lead in the teeth of continued challenges from his very determined teammate. Running on medium-compound Pirellis, both Mercedes stretched away from a chasing pack led initially by Charles Leclerc’s soft-shod Ferrari.
Leclerc had qualified within a tenth of a second of Bottas and had an edge on both Mercedes during Q2. On race pace the silver cars were too strong, though, and Leclerc had too much going on in his mirrors to put together a challenge against the leaders.
Hamilton tigered Bottas throughout the opening stint, and although Bottas briefly locked his front-left wheel into Vale at the end of lap two he otherwise remained solid in defence. On the fourth time around, Hamilton tried to go around his team-mate on the outside at Brooklands, couldn’t quite make it stick, then cut back in at Luffield and got his nose ahead on the run to the old start-finish straight. The Bottas of old was considered fragile in wheel-to-wheel combat but the bearded, porridge-eating 2019 model is less of a pushover: the Finn went to the inside at Copse, kept his foot in and regained the advantage.
Keeping the crowd on its toes was taking its toll on Bottas’s tyres, though, and Hamilton’s engineer Peter Bonnington advised his charge that the leading car’s front-left was “opening up”. On lap 16, earlier than planned, Bottas dived into the pits for another set of mediums and Hamilton moved to the front.
Bottas was marginally quicker with the fresher tyres and would probably have regained the lead when Hamilton pitted, though that was not how the situation panned out. As Alfa Romeo’s Antonio Giovinazzi came to the end of his 19th lap he locked up his rear wheels and spun into the gravel at Vale. When it became clear the car was beached, race control upgraded the situation from a local waved yellow flag to a safety car deployment. Hamilton was able to pit for hard tyres, theoretically enabling him to run to the end if he could make them last, while Bottas would have to make a second stop.
Hamilton emerged in the lead and never surrendered it – and broke the lap record on his last time around, earning an extra point as he brought the crowd to its feet. It later emerged that the drivers themselves had suggested an offset strategy in which whoever was second would take the hard compound rather than the medium at the first stop. Bottas therefore authored his own defeat by rooting his tyres so early, committing himself to two stops.
“Maybe not my luckiest day, but that’s life,” said Bottas.
“It feels incredible,” said Hamilton. “To hear that
I have six wins, to be up there with the greats, is one of the coolest things.”
2.Has Sebastian Vettel already checked out of his title challenge?
Sebastian Vettel’s burgeoning reputation for choking at crucial moments gained further momentum as he made heavy weather of qualifying and then picked up a penalty in the race for a clumsy challenge on Max Verstappen’s Red Bull.
Viewed from trackside, Vettel never looked quite as committed as his Ferrari team-mate
Charles Leclerc.
Not only did he qualify three places behind Leclerc in sixth, he barely improved his time from Q1 through to Q3, saying: “I struggled to extract what was in the car. I couldn’t get the right feel, I’m not happy with how it went.”
Vettel got by the second Red Bull of Pierre Gasly away from the start, but then fell behind again after catching the Leclercverstappen battle for second and being briefly held up as they squabbled at The Loop on lap 11. That enabled Gasly to latch back onto his tail and claim the inside line into Village next time around, a move that seemed to catch Vettel by surprise.
Gasly then pitted for a second set of mediums, a stop that appeared to put him out of the picture for he then got stuck behind the Mclaren of Carlos Sainz, while Verstappen and Leclerc also made what appeared to be scheduled stops for mediums on lap 13.
That dropped them behind Vettel and cost Leclerc a place as Verstappen got out of the pits first. They then stayed behind Vettel when he stopped under safety car conditions seven laps later and they were called in for second stops.
The safety car also brought Gasly back into play but he didn’t have an answer to Vettel’s pace, and on lap 27 Red Bull ordered its cars to swap places: Verstappen surged by into Stowe and set off in pursuit of Vettel.
Ten laps later Verstappen swept past Vettel around the outside in a Drs-assisted move at Stowe, running slightly wide at the exit, enabling Vettel to get back on his tail into Vale.
There Verstappen jinked left as Vettel lunged for the inside, but the move was never really on: there was less than a car’s width available even before Verstappen moved. Vettel slammed into the back of the Red Bull and launched it into the air.
Verstappen was able to carry on to fifth place while the stewards slapped Vettel with a 10s penalty that left him classified 16th at the finish.
“I guess he misjudged his braking in there,” said Verstappen.
3.Max and Charles go at it again
“Austria was quite an eye-opener for me in terms of how far we can go and what is accepted,” said Charles Leclerc in the aftermath of a wheel-bashing British Grand Prix. “This race was quite fun from inside the car.”
Two weeks after Max Verstappen sealed victory over Leclerc with a controversial late-race move in Austria, the two young guns found themselves circulating in close company on the fast, sweeping bends of Silverstone. What could possibly go wrong?
Leclerc qualified his Ferrari third, while Verstappen was over a tenth of a second in arrears in fourth place, though that margin was exaggerated by the Red Bull suffering pronounced turbo lag in slow corners. Verstappen reckoned the issue cost him at least a couple of tenths and possibly even a shot at pole position.
Though Leclerc held on to third away from the start, Verstappen harried him throughout the first stint and emerged from the pits narrowly ahead when they stopped on lap 13. Verstappen initially struggled on his second set of tyres and ran wide at The Loop on his out-lap, enabling Leclerc to reclaim the initiative.
Once Verstappen had brought his tyres up to temperature he closed back in again and made a lunge up the inside into Copse on lap 18, only to have the door slammed in his face.
“He’s moving pretty late,” he complained, a statement some of his rivals might consider a trifle hypocritical.
The safety car period then separated them as they both made second stops, Leclerc a lap later. Having lost ground he benefited from the subsequent Vettelverstappen shunt to finish third.
“We’ve got some work to do on our race pace and to keep our tyres as Mercedes and Red Bull are,” said Leclerc. “My favourite move was when he [Verstappen] passed me and I passed him back on the outside of Copse.”
4.Safety car shakes up battle for‘best of the rest’
Nothing is straightforward in the scrap for ‘best of the rest’ honours behind the leading trio of teams. Few would have bet on Mclaren’s Carlos Sainz achieving this, annexing sixth place from
13th on the grid after a troubled qualifying – especially since his team-mate Lando Norris started eighth, just behind the Renault of Daniel Ricciardo.
What swung the race was that while Renault dropped the ball with both its drivers, Mclaren only did it with one.
Norris got by Ricciardo on the opening lap, and although Ricciardo successfully undercut Norris to get ahead again when they stopped on laps 12 and 13, the safety car torpedoed both their strategies – as well as that of Ricciardo’s teammate Nico Hulkenberg, who had stopped at the same time as Norris.
Ricciardo made a second stop behind the safety car and this ultimately mitigated the damage, even though it initially dropped him behind Norris again. Norris had to make a second stop on lap 35 while Hulkenberg slogged to the finish without stopping again, inheriting the final points position when
Toro Rosso’s Alex Albon slowed two laps from the end.
Sainz passed the Alfa Romeos of Kimi Raikkonen and Antonio Giovinazzi on the opening lap to run 11th, then gained five more positions as Pierre Gasly, Ricciardo, Norris, Albon and Hulkenberg stopped early. The safety car came at an opportune time for Sainz, enabling him to pit for hard-compound tyres and lose just one place, to Gasly.
He regained sixth later on when Sebastian Vettel clattered into Max Verstappen and had to stop for a new nose cone, but in the closing laps he had to fight to keep
Ricciardo behind him.
“I think we were anyway on a one-stop race,” said the Spaniard. “Everyone else was on a two-stop, so I don’t think the result would have been too different.”
5. How Haas managed to implode on lap one
As if the embattled Haas team wasn’t in enough of a spin with the rollercoaster performance of its VF19 chassis and the increasingly bizarre conduct of its title sponsor, its drivers contrived to take each other out of the British Grand Prix within a handful of seconds of the start.
Romain Grosjean set the tone for the weekend when he spun on cold tyres while leaving the pits at the beginning of first practice on Friday. Kevin Magnussen failed to progress beyond Q1, and had a brief run off the circuit while “trying to make up for something that wasn’t there” on his way to a 16th-place grid spot. Grosjean narrowly avoided the drop but could do no better than 14th in Q2. His car was running in Australian Grand Prix specification in a bid to gain more understanding of why the VF19 often can’t generate sufficient tyre temperature to run competitively.
Magnussen made a typically punchy start and managed to get a run around the outside of Grosjean through The Loop on the first lap but, as they accelerated onto the straight, momentum carried Grosjean into his team-mate, who had no more room to move over without going off. Both picked up rear punctures and floor damage.
After stopping for hardcompound Pirellis both drivers continued, but Magnussen was called in to retire after six more laps, Grosjean after nine.
“It was a very disappointing race for us,” said team principal Guenther Steiner. “I’m just stating the obvious here. The best that our drivers could bring to the battle was a shovel – to dig the hole we’re in even deeper. We need to go back, regroup, and see what we do in future.”