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The 70th Anniversary Grand Prix race was well worthy of being attached to such a celebration, providing a level of action and suspense that overall easily surpassed that of the preceding British Grand Prix – even if it never quite reached its level of abject drama.
As Mercedes’ hopes of sweeping the season were dashed and lots of intra-team battles were settled decisively, we select our winners and losers from the race.
Winners
Max Verstappen
“Mate, this is the only chance to be this close to Mercedes. I’m not just sitting behind like a grandma!”
Verstappen made his intentions clear early on in this race when he kept the Mercedes duo firmly in sight after clearing Nico Hulkenberg’s Racing Point off the line.
What followed was Verstappen at his best: fast, measured, consistent and confident, bordering on cocky. He was so assured in the final moments of an excellent grand prix he reprised his joke from last week, asking his engineer if he’d remembered to hydrate – then suggested he washed his hands as well, for good hygiene.
It’s criminal we see so little of Verstappen in the lead fight in F1 2020. But today showed that if you give him an opportunity, he is absolutely ready to take it.
His reward was a fine victory and second place in the championship. There’s no way anyone would have believed that likely a couple of weeks ago.
Scott Mitchell
Lewis Hamilton, offset master
Given that this was a rare day when his car/tyre combination just wasn’t good enough, Hamilton rescued a second by being proactive.
He braved that long second stint to give him the tyre offset he needed to beat his title rival and team-mate, who otherwise was actually quicker this weekend.
Mark Hughes
Charles Leclerc
You weren’t supposed to be able to do this race on a one-stop. You just weren’t. Some had to three-stop! But nobody told Leclerc and Ferrari.
This was a massive surprise because Leclerc had suggested he would really struggle, as he had on Friday. And he dropped two places straight away on the first lap.
But whether it was some set-up changes or the warmer temperatures and track suddenly coming to Ferrari, Leclerc had pace to burn. He stopped in tandem with those around him, so it wasn’t like the first stint set him up for a one-stop.
Yet he kept plugging away and showed no signs of teetering off the edge of a performance cliff in an even superior performance to last week.
It’s nothing short of astounding that he was just 10 seconds adrift of Valtteri Bottas’s Mercedes at the flag. – SM
Nico Hulkenberg
While seventh place is a disappointing result given he had a hold on fourth place for a chunk of the race, the fact he got a good result on his first race distance in the Racing Point and only finished behind Lance Stroll thanks to having to make an extra pitstop shows he can still deliver in F1.
The late pitstop looked confounding at first but was, as the team explained, caused by Hulkenberg reporting “a significant vibration”. Racing Point says he was “unlikely to make the flag” otherwise, which would’ve been a far less fitting end to a great weekend.
Edd Straw
Pirelli
The gap between the two races must have been a nervy time for Pirelli, given what went down last week (see what I did there?), but it stuck to its guns about the softer compounds, way softer than the track demanded.
But in the circumstances of this year’s competitive domination by Merc, it made the race. It allowed a compromised package that otherwise wouldn’t have stood a chance to win.
It was an opportunistic win from Red Bull and Verstappen, based upon the foundation of a better tyre strategy and usage. – MH
Esteban Ocon
Esteban Ocon’s being compared to two ‘sort-of-team-mates’ this year – actual Renault team-mate Daniel Ricciardo and fellow Mercedes junior George Russell, both of whom he needs to look more impressive than, really, if he wants to find himself in a Mercedes by the middle of the decade.
Ricciardo’s qualifying heroics on a day when Ocon got a blocking penalty made yesterday a poor one for Ocon, but he thrived in the race circumstances as Ricciardo put in an uncharacteristically scrappy performance. Leclerc will rightly get plenty of plaudits for taking Ferrari to the brink of another podium with a one-stop strategy, but Ocon deserves nearly as many for making the same tactic work to go from 14th to eighth.
Definitely his strong day so far of what had been a quiet year up to this point.
Matt Beer
Losers
Mercedes’ perfect record
Would this have been winnable with a different tyre call? Did they play it too safe?
Given that the car isn’t at it best at these sort of high track temperatures, perhaps something other than the standard safe option might have been considered. – MH
Valtteri Bottas’ title hopes
Bottas will have got out of bed this morning knowing he had every chance of taking a win and gaining some ground on team-mate Hamilton in the championship fight.
Instead, he finished third, having been passed late on by Hamilton after being at a strategic disadvantage, and is now staring at an even bigger points deficit. – ES
Kevin Magnussen
Track limits penalties risk making heroic round-the-outside moves perilous for a very boring reason, so there was no real problem with Kevin Magnussen slewing a mile off the track at Stowe while trying to hurl his Haas around the outside of Nicholas Latifi’s Williams.
But the sensible thing to do then would’ve been to lift and slot back in behind the Williams, not to swipe back onto the track as if it would’ve vanished. A five-second penalty was very much merited.
Throw in being seven-tenths slower than Romain Grosjean as his team-mate made it into Q2 and Magnussen didn’t, plus an eventual retirement from last place, and this was an underwhelming weekend for a man who’s been a real hero in the back end of the midfield at other times this season. – MB
Daniel Ricciardo
Ricciardo looked like he would get away with not having two sets of the hards for the race, but he ended up on a medium/medium/hard strategy that pretty much locked in the timing of his second stop to one that put him in traffic.
He then spun and ended up finishing 14th, which was scant reward given the improvement the Renault had made. A costly mistake. – ES
Sebastian Vettel
Vettel will be desperate to see the back of Silverstone. He made a good start and challenged Alex Albon into Turn 1 but whether it was being spooked by Leclerc locking up ahead or being wary of the Red Bull on his outside he took too much kerb into the first corner, kicked up some dust and lost the rear.
It was only Carlos Sainz Jr’s lightning reflexes that prevented contact that would have wrecked Vettel’s race completely and potentially caused real carnage.
Thereafter Vettel could, probably should, have recovered to the points. But he was mediocre in combat and very unhappy with his team’s strategy, which did seem fundamentally flawed.
So it was a painful, point-less run to 12th, and probably Vettel’s worst race of a miserable season. – SM
