The Times - UK (2020-08-03)

58 1GM Monday August 3 2020 | the times

SportBritish Grand Prix

5

powerful position to go on and win a

seventh world title this season, which

would equal Michael Schumacher’s

record. With three successive victories,

he is now only four race wins short of

Schumacher’s tally of 91, a milestone

that looks increasingly likely to be

passed this season, even with a calendar

truncated by the pandemic.

Hamilton put his late troubles yester-

day down to stray materials in his path.

“I’m convinced it was debris,” he said.

“There was a lot of debris on the track.”

As well as Bottas and Hamilton, Carlos

Sainz also suffered a late puncture.

The Red Bull team, too, discovered

damage to the tyres that they removed

from Verstappen’s car before that

frantic final lap. “Max’s tyres weren’t in

great shape and there was no guarantee

he would have got to the end of the

race,” Horner added. “So it was wise to

pit for new rubber.”

The debris was a reminder of the

earlier crashes that resulted in early

departures from the race for Kevin

Magnussen, who lost a front wheel

after colliding with Alex Albon on the

opening lap, and Daniil Kvyat, who

smashed head-on into the barriers at

Maggotts on the 13th lap.

Nico Hülkenberg, meanwhile, a

replacement driver with Racing Point

for Sergio Pérez, who had tested posi-

tive for coronavirus on Friday, did not

even make it to the starting grid when

his car failed to power up.

The accidents that accounted for

Magnussen and Kvyat led to two spells

of Hamilton trailing impatiently

behind that safety car, but he success-

fully restarted the race each time and

he seemed unlikely to be challenged.

All of which changed on that memo-

rable final lap. Once the drama of it all

had sunk in, he took his familiar place

on the top of the podium, smiled wryly

and shook his head in disbelief.

If the rest of the field are unable to

catch him when he is on three wheels,

then they stand little chance when he is

back on four.

How the

late drama

unfolded at

Silverstone

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10

L Hamilton

V Bottas

M Verstappen

L Norris

C Leclerc

A Albon

S Pérez

L Stroll

D Ricciardo

C Sainz

Drivers Team Points

Mercedes

Mercedes

Red Bull

McLaren

Ferrari

Red Bull

Racing Point

Racing Point

Renault

McLaren

88

58

52

36

33

26

22

20

20

15

How they finished

4 5 6 7 8 9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

D Ricciardo (Aus) Renault +19.650

L Norris (GB) McLaren +22.277

E Ocon (Fr) Renault +26.937

P Gasly (Fr) AlphaTauri +31.188

A Albon (Thai) Red Bull +32.670

L Stroll (Can) Racing Point +37.311

S Vettel (Ger) Ferrari +41.857

V Bottas (Fin) Mercedes +42.167

G Russell (GB) Williams +52.004

C Sainz (Sp) McLaren +53.370

A Giovinazzi (It) Alfa Romeo +54.205

N Latifi (Can) Williams +54.549

R Grosjean (Fr) Haas +55.050

K Raikkonen (Fin) Alfa Romeo +1 lap

D Kvyat (Russ) AlphaTauri DNF

K Magnussen (Den) Haas DNF

N Hülkenberg (Ger) Racing Point DNF

M Verstappen (Neth)

Red Bull+5.856sec

C Leclerc (Mon)

Ferrari +18.474

Fastest lap Verstappen 1min 27.097sec

Constructors

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Mercedes

Red Bull

McLaren

Ferrari

Racing Point

Renault

AlphaTauri

Alfa Romeo

146

78

51

43

42

32

13

2

L Hamilton (GB)

Mercedes 1hr 28min 1.283sec

Britain Anniversary (Silverstone); August 9,

Spain (Catalunya); August 16, Belgium

(Spa-Francorchamps); August 30, Italy (Monza);

September 6, Tuscany (Mugello); September 13,

Russia (Sochi); September 27, Germany Eifel

(Nurburgring); October 11, Portugal (Algarve);

October 25, Italy (Imola); November 1

Points

1

3

Even with a tyre

in bits Hamilton

cannot be beaten

John Westerby

Drivers’ anti-racism protest ‘coming together bit by bit’

The anti-racism protest

by drivers before the

British Grand Prix

yesterday was “more

professional”, according

to Lewis Hamilton, as

time was set aside in

the pre-race schedule to

avoid the disjointed

efforts at the previous

two races. The drivers

stood at the front of the

grid wearing “End

Racism” T-shirts, with

Hamilton’s reading

“Black Lives Matter”.

The drivers recorded a

video message for

television audiences.

Kevin Magnussen

joined the previous six

drivers who had opted

not to take the knee,

standing behind the 13

drivers who did,

underlining the

continuing difference of

opinion about that

particular gesture. “If

you look at other sports

all over the world,

they’re all doing it

united,” Hamilton said.

“I do hope that bit by bit

we can come more

together.”

For the first 51 laps of the British Grand
Prix yesterday, the greatest irritation
that Lewis Hamilton had experienced
was the sluggish progress being made
by the safety car in front of him after an
accident further back in the field.
Having recently taken a pitstop,
Hamilton was attempting to pick up
speed behind the safety car to increase
the temperature of his new tyres, only
to be frustrated by the saloon car in
front of him. “This safety car needs to
speed up,” he complained to his team.
“It’s too slow for us.” If a horn had been
built into his Mercedes, he would have
been honking it.
The concerns over those tyres
became rather more pressing on that
dramatic final lap, when he suffered a
puncture to his front-left tyre with just
over half a lap to go. At the end of a race
in which he had barely been troubled,
starting in pole position and keeping
Valtteri Bottas, his Mercedes team-
mate, at arm’s length with some
comfort, Hamilton suddenly found
himself in serious danger of letting slip
a 31-second lead in the space of one
5.891km circuit of his favourite circuit
at Silverstone.
With every turn that followed on that
agonising final half-a-lap, the rubber on
that front tyre became shredded a little
further so that Hamilton would
finish the race virtually racing a
three-wheeler, all the while with
Max Verstappen roaring ever
closer to him. “That was heart-
in-the-mouth feelings,” he said.
And if the usual adoring crowds
had been present in the Silver-
stone grandstands yesterday,
there would have been 140,000
hearts in mouths feeling his
pain.
There had been a warning
sign a couple of laps earlier when
Bottas had experienced the same
problem and, having cruised
through the rest of the race in
second place behind Hamilton,
suddenly found himself going back-
wards at a rate of knots.
Made aware of Bottas’s mishap
behind him, Hamilton checked his own
tyres. “When I heard Valtteri’s tyre had
gone, I looked at mine and everything
seemed fine,” he said. “Then it just
suddenly deflated down the straight.”
The smooth balance he had felt in the
car for the rest of the race, with the two
Mercedes cars once again involved in a
different race from the remainder of the
field, was no longer there. “The RPM
drops and you feel the balance start to
shift to the left,” Hamilton said. “I
thought, ‘Jeez, how am I going to get
through?’”

There will not be many opportunities

to beat these dominant Mercedes cars

this season and one had abruptly pre-

sented itself to Verstappen.

When Bottas had dropped back, the

Red Bull driver had unexpectedly

found himself in second

place and, with the inten-

tion of claiming an

extra point for the

fastest lap and a com-

fortable cushion to the

Ferrari of Charles

Leclerc in third, he

nipped in for a quick

tyre change, emerging as

the fastest car on the track. Little did he

know that Hamilton was about to sus-

tain a puncture, but in the blink of an

eye he began gaining quickly on the

leader. A gap of 31sec was evaporating

with alarming speed and Hamil-

ton’s team began communi-

cating a race situation that

was changing by the

second. “I could hear the

gap coming down from

19 [seconds] to ten,”

Hamilton said. “And

then it was nine, eight,

seven...”

By now, Hamilton’s tyre

had only the loosest rela-

tionship with the rest of the car

and looked as though it could

detach itself at any moment.

Coming around Stowe corner and

down towards Vale, Verstappen had

appeared in his wing mirror. And on

the last two turns, around Club

corner, Hamilton was clinging

on in hope rather than

expectation. “I nearly

didn’t get it round those last

corners,” he said. “I was just

praying.”

When he crossed the finish line,

the gap to Verstappen had been

reduced to a mere 5.856sec and

Hamilton breathed a huge sigh of

relief. “That was close,” he said

on the radio, with knowing un-

derstatement. Over in Verstap-

pen’s garage, Christian Horner,

the Red Bull team principal,

offered his own version of

events. “He’s a lucky boy,” Horner said.

Despite the unbearably close call and

the flirtation with disaster, Hamilton

has come through the drama in a

7

British Grand Prix

victories for Hamilton —

two more than the next

best drivers, Jim Clark

and Alain Prost, who

won five apiece

Hamilton gives the Black Power salute
after collecting his winners’ trophy