F1 Talk: The Brilliant Battle at the British GP

Last weekend was incredible if you were a sports fan in the United Kingdom. Wimbledon is well under way, England beat Sweden in the World Cup quarter-finals and the British GP was Formula 1 at its best. A truly magnificent event.

The newly resurfaced 5.89KM track was meant to be the perfect setting for Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes to cruise to victory in front of 350,000 supporters at Silverstone. But as the practice sessions went on, Ferrari looked threatening as they topped a session on a Friday for the first time this year. Hundredths of a second split the Mercedes and Ferrari cars.

A third DRS zone was added for the start/finish straight all the way to the braking zone at turn 3. People thought that using DRS through turns 1 and 2 at Abbey would cause problems and we saw Romain Grosjean hit the wall hard in practice and more significantly Marcus Ericsson made a similar error in the race. Did the extra zone help? Not really but it was more of a challenge in the race when you’re within one second of the car ahead whilst in the turbulent air and still trying to keep your foot flat to the throttle pedal.

Saturday saw Hamilton at his best. Ferrari had the better qualifying car and I believe that Ferrari set their car up more for qualifying than they usually do. Raikkonen and Vettel didn’t get the most out of their cars but that said, neither did Hamilton. All three of them sent their cars into every corner with so much speed. It was a really exciting qualifying session and it was only a taste of what was to come.

Hamilton was very emotional after setting a sensational lap under the severe pressure from his home crowd and knowing that it would be the toughest pole position to take at Silverstone for a very long time. He was almost in tears as he kneeled down to his Mercedes and saluted his fans as he always does. When Hamilton does leave Formula 1, he’ll inevitably miss that feeling of pulling out a special lap at a special time.

The battle raged onto Sunday and all eyes were on Hamilton to see if he could add to an amazing weekend for British sport. But it all went wrong immediately as he had too much wheelspin at the start and was down to 3rd place by turn two. Bottas was on the inside of him at turn one which compromised his exit speed towards turn three as Hamilton had to get out of the throttle. Raikkonen had a chance to overtake him but locked up and turned Hamilton around which put Hamilton at the back of the field.

Mercedes Team Principal, Toto Wolff, concurred with the words of James Allison by saying it was “incompetent or deliberate.” That was completely stupid but understandable in the heat of the moment.

Why would Kimi Raikkonen of all people deliberately hit Hamilton? Raikkonen simply locked up and didn’t quite meet the apex, clashing his front left wheel with Hamilton’s rear right tyre, very similar to Vettel hitting Bottas at turn one in France. So why did Raikkonen get a 10-second time penalty rather than a 5-second time penalty?

For me, Raikkonen’s penalty was correct and it was Vettel’s in France that was wrong. Plus, Vettel caused Bottas to take damage whereas Raikkonen’s clash was just wheel to wheel contact. It also reminded me of when Max Verstappen turned around Vettel in China at the hairpin, except that was much, much later in the race. Verstappen then took a 10-second time penalty. Raikkonen hitting Hamilton was simply a clumsy error, just like Vettel hitting Bottas or just like Verstappen’s horrid start to the season.

The timing of it, being at a British Grand Prix; hitting Hamilton of all people and just two races after a Mercedes and a Ferrari collided meant that a silly mistake was blown well out of proportion. Raikkonen himself has said sorry and he is one of the cleanest drivers on the grid. Any talk of deliberately hitting Hamilton is nonsense. I’ll leave the incident with this from Vettel which is a statement that I completely agree with:

“It’s silly to think that anything happened was deliberate”

Vettel started to gap Bottas but it became apparent that he was suffering from graining on the left front tyre especially. My theory is that Ferrari sacrificed a little bit of tyre wear performance for qualifying performance instead. After major upgrades from Mercedes in Austria and France, Ferrari have hit back strongly and they are now the benchmark in terms of outright engine power, probably no more than 10BHP ahead of Mercedes.

I do think that the internal combustion units are similar in terms of performance for Ferrari and Mercedes. Also they have significantly better energy recovery and deployment on a high throttle % lap compared to the Honda and Renault engines. That was evident at Silverstone and with very little braking zones, that’s why we saw such a big spread between the engines. All the Ferrari engine powered cars got into Q3, apart from Marcus Ericsson and neither of the works Renault team cars got into the top 10 either.

Max Verstappen said that it was like having an F2 car down the straights versus an F1 car. Exaggerating of course but Renault and Honda were losing at least one second on the flat out sections at Silverstone

As the race drew on Hamilton easily made his way through the field. Nobody made it difficult for him which was a shame but if someone did try to fight Hamilton then they would lose time and lose tyre life fighting an inevitable overtake from the Brit. The problem for Hamilton was that he had a 12 second gap to the Red Bulls.

Amazingly, his pace was on another level as he lapped over a second quicker than the leaders at times. Had he been at the front then he would surely have ran away with the win. Maybe that’s why he was so disappointed after the race. He still needed a bit of luck though and he got exactly that when Ericsson crashed at turn one when he didn’t close his DRS when going through Abbey.

Onto the next big topic, which was; Should Mercedes have pitted their cars? Ferrari did exactly the right thing to pit Vettel from the lead because he was struggling on his tyres much more, compared to the Mercedes. Raikkonen and Verstappen pitted as well. Ricciardo had already pitted a few laps before the safety car so stayed out and had a more expensive pitstop (because he had pitted under green flag conditions).

Bottas should have pitted. He was on old medium tyres compared to brand new soft tyres for his rivals. Yes, track position is key but you can overtake at Silverstone and the slipstream effect is quite strong. In similar circumstances to China, Mercedes made a mistake… again. It was a bit more complicated this time but it wasn’t a VSC so pitting under a SC knowing that you won’t lose track position and getting fresh tyres was the right thing to do.

Also, there was actually a clear performance advantage by being on the soft tyres. The soft compound was around 0.8 quicker than a medium compound. Sometimes there’s not much difference between the tyres but at Silverstone there was. It was a clear and obvious decision, unlike Austria but with hundreds of people on the Mercedes team and more technology than a NASA spaceship, Mercedes made the wrong strategic decision.

You can’t blame the drivers because they don’t know the race situation as well as the engineers and the team do. They won’t know what the gap is, how long their rivals have been on their tyres for etc. This is were the best strategists in the world should be making the correct decisions. One mistake here or there is acceptable but making too many mistakes under high pressure situations is not good.

I will say that leaving Hamilton out on track was the correct decision. A second place is a stunning recovery from what should have been 4th at best without the safety cars. Had Hamilton pitted then he would have had to overtake five cars to take the win which I couldn’t really see happening and had he pitted then he probably won’t have got second place. He should be very happy with his recovery drive and the team made the correct decision to get the best results for his race.

What was to come was incredible. Raikkonen and Verstappen had a titanic battle down the Wellington Straight, through Luffield. Woodcote and Copse. It was a fantastic battle. For Verstappen to go around the outside of Raikkonen at Luffield was staggering. Then they stayed away from each other whilst doing 180MPH at Copse, unlike Romain Grosjean and Carlos Sainz.

Grosjean had lost the rear end momentarily and hit Sainz in a scary accident earlier in the race. Completely Grosjean’s fault but you can argue that Sainz should have been more weary about going around the outside of a driver who always finds himself in an accident. It’s such a shame because the Haas is a very quick car, but Grosjean is making too many errors and finding himself in bad positions when he shouldn’t be. He even hit his teammate, Kevin Magnussen at turn 3 at the start.

That collision brought out a second safety car. With 11 laps remaining Mercedes and Ferrari treated us to one of the best battles ever. The racecraft we witnessed was sensational. Bottas battled so hard and made all the right moves as he covered the line and blocked Vettel when he could. A surprise dive at the end of the Wellington Straight from Vettel as he desperately tried to slow the car down, without messing it up like he did in Baku this year, caught Bottas out and Vettel took the lead. An excellent, clean move and I’m sure he is a massive pain in the neck for Mercedes.

Bottas even tried to stop Hamilton from going passed but he just didn’t have the grip. Fellow Finn Raikkonen overtook Bottas as well but Bottas did stop Ricciardo from getting near him. Instead if making the moves with fresh tyres, moves were being made on him. But like I said, it was so dramatic and so enthralling.

When we look back at this race in the future, we will see it as a classic. I loved those last dozen laps or so because it was motorsport at its best and it’s not often F1 produces that kind of entertainment.