In Pictures: Great Britain 2020
The 2020 British Grand Prix saw the first person infected with the dreadful coronavirus, Sergio Perez, who had to be replaced and the chosen was fan favorite and lemans winner Nico Hulkenberg. But the fairytale was not to be as an issue with a bolt in the Racing Point's Mercedes power unit prevented it from firing up and thus handling a DNS to the Hulk.
As had happened in Austria and Hungary, Saturday's qualifying gave a glimpse of how far ahead the Mercedes cars are from the rest, with Lewis Hamilton claiming pole position, his 91st, with a blistering 1:24.303, a new track record at Silverstone. That lap was only 0.313 ahead of his own teammate Valtteri Bottas but more than a second from the rest.
The race went as expected, Hamilton made a good start and never lost the lead of the race, but drama stroke only a couple of laps from the end when the left front tire in Bottas' W11 disintegrated, forcing him to enter the pits, losing precious time he came out far behind, relinquishing his rather secured second place to Max Verstappen. Bottas finished a distant and point-less eleventh. Then it was Carlos Sainz's turn, when the front left let go, and as with Valtteri, he had the unscheduled pitstop. He finished P13. The Red Bull Team having seen what had happened and fearing it might happen to them also asked Max to change tires, losing time but not place on the race when Lewis' front left disintegrated as well, just half a lap from the end, but he had such a lead that he finished his home race on three wheels in first place.
QUOTES FROM THE PODIUM
“It was a difficult day, but a good one. I am very satisfied with this result. We know we were a bit lucky, but sometimes these things happen and you need to be there to take the opportunity. It was not easy. We extracted absolutely everything from the package today. Of course, we don’t want to be fighting for fourth place for too much longer, but at the moment that’s what our car is capable of.”
“I know everyone is asking whether we should not have pitted for the soft tire because we could have won but could have, would have, should have. You can always ask these questions with hindsight but I don’t regret anything and I believe we made the right decision to pit for fastest lap at the end. At the end of the day Mercedes deserved to win as they were faster than us, some people are saying Lewis was lucky but he was actually unlucky to get the puncture in the first place and so was Bottas. ”
“I started to back off and down the straight it deflated and I just noticed the shape just shift a bit,” said Hamilton. “That was definitely a heart in the mouth feeling because I wasn’t quite sure it had gone down until I hit the brakes. And then you could see the tyre was falling off the rim. I was just driving it, trying to keep the speed up. Sometimes it will take off and break the wing. I was just praying it would get round and it would not be too slow. I nearly didn’t get round the last two corners. But thank God it did. I really owe it to the team, ultimately maybe we should have stopped towards the end once we saw the delaminations.”
