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Formula 1’s British Grand Prix spent an hour and 23 minutes being lukewarm before boiling over in a chaotic 292 seconds that turned the race on its head.
In less than five minutes, Valtteri Bottas was dumped out of second place, Carlos Sainz Jr lost fourth and then Lewis Hamilton’s serene run to victory was thrown into heart-dropping doubt across a dramatic final three laps.
Around that spate of tyre failures, one Mercedes got lucky, Red Bull potentially threw away victory, and Daniel Ricciardo surged to an unlikely equal-best result for the works Renault team.
Breaking down the key moments reveals just how intricately weaved together the web of events was, and how a few vital seconds in Hamilton’s favour could easily have gone the other way.
Ground Zero: Bottas sparks the drama
A big vibration had already dropped Bottas off the back of Hamilton in the two-horse race at the front but he was desperately unlucky to round the flat-out final Club corner with three laps to go and suddenly suffer a failure.
“Something’s happened,” he radioed to his team. “Something happened with the tyre.”
Verstappen, a few seconds behind the second-place driver at this point, clocked it immediately – “Bottas is struggling Max,” he was told before replying, “Yeah, he has a puncture, I think”.
Bottas did, and ran wide into Village with Verstappen two seconds adrift. By the time he got back on track and limped through The Loop left-hander, Verstappen eased by on the outside.
“You’ve got 28 seconds to Leclerc,” Bottas was told as he continued the painstaking process of nearly a complete lap of Silverstone with a front-left puncture.
Through Becketts the tyre nearly detached completely and was flailing aggressively. By the time he pitted, Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari had wiped out half a minute’s deficit in two-thirds of a lap.
“There’s always a lot of factors when that kind of failure happens and maybe it’s just a small thing that can kind of trigger it at the end when it’s on the limit,” Bottas reflected later.
“Towards the end of the stint, there was quite a bit of vibration and it was getting worse, but not like big steps.
“Then suddenly the puncture happened and I couldn’t predict it.”
78s: Red Bull goes conservative
As soon as Verstappen realised Bottas’s strife, he told his engineer: “Yeah, I’m also going to take it easy on this tyre now, mate.”
Then, a few seconds later: “I’m really going to back it out.” This was not an explicit ‘I’m worried, can we continue?’ but it was an acknowledgement of concern and the need for caution.
Red Bull then had two choices: continue, cruising to the finish in the hope the tyre holds out just on the off chance the other Mercedes hit trouble, or take advantage of track position and a huge gap to Leclerc to pit for fresh tyres and go for the fastest lap.
By the time Verstappen was on the Hangar Straight near the end of the lap, Red Bull had opted for the second strategy. He was told to box, 78 seconds after Bottas’s puncture occurred.
Given Bottas had been battling a vibration and there was no specific reason to think Hamilton would be struck by a similar failure, this was an understandable albeit conservative decision.
There was no real indicator that Verstappen’s front-left tyre was at risk, although this was a narrative Red Bull pushed quite hard post-race – with team boss Christian Horner claiming: “The tyre that came off the car had about 50 little cuts in it, so it’s been through debris.”
Verstappen rejoined with soft tyres and the simple task of going three tenths quicker than his personal best, to secure fastest lap.
He had a relatively slow out-lap as he made sure he had all the tools at his disposal, including a charged battery and his engine settings correctly readied.
166s: Hamilton cracks on with Mercedes not ‘alert’
Mercedes, crucially, did not take the opportunity to pit Hamilton after Verstappen changed tyres despite having a decent window to do so.
Hamilton was only informed of Verstappen’s stop on the run to Copse but the team would have known several seconds earlier, so probably had the best part of a minute to decide.
“Max has just stopped to take another tyre,” Hamilton was told. “It looks like he’ll be going for the fastest lap so we won’t bother trying.”
This was a reiteration of an earlier ‘just get it to the finish’ message. As soon as Bottas’s puncture was confirmed Hamilton had been told to protect the tyres and requested he did not push for fastest lap – and Hamilton duly obliged, dropping his pace at the same time.
If Mercedes felt a calm run to the end was enough, it could still have reacted with greater caution.
But Hamilton, with a 34-second advantage, was feeling nothing of concern in the car though, and was all but home and dry.
“I was managing it and I didn’t have any vibrations,” he said post-race. “I had some blistering on my right front but I’ve driven with that for a long time and it’s never really been an issue.
“So we didn’t really have anything unusual, there weren’t really any obvious signs as to something that was coming.”
He therefore shot past the pitlane exit and prepared to start his final lap. But trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin admitted afterwards: “With hindsight, when Max stopped we should have brought in Lewis because when Max stopped we had the gap.
“But to be honest at that stage we thought Valtteri’s issue was quite isolated, and probably weren’t alert to it being something that affected both cars.”
198s: Failure #2, but the die is cast
Having inherited fourth place thanks to Bottas’s failure, Sainz spent his penultimate lap preparing to fight off Ricciardo, who had worked his way past the other McLaren of Lando Norris.
But as he exited Copse, the front left began to wobble – and when Sainz attempted to throw the car left then right through Maggots, the car wouldn’t follow.
Sainz radioed “puncture!” before he’d barely had time to get the McLaren back under control, scrambled back onto the track and watched the tyre almost completely separate from the rim down the Hangar Straight.
“We knew it was going to be tight on the tyres,” Sainz later confessed. “I guess mother luck hasn’t been with me during these first three or four races and today we lost a lot of points.
“I’m disappointed but at the same time everything was done correctly right up until two laps until the end, so I cannot be too tough on the team or myself.”
By the time Sainz’s fate was sealed, Verstappen was at the end of his out-lap and Hamilton was onto his final tour.
If the McLaren driver’s misery was a warning of further drama, it came too late to be useful to the leading teams.
208s: Hamilton’s failure and the vital seconds that saved him
Roughly 10 seconds after Sainz was forced off the road with his puncture, Hamilton radioed his pits with an unexpectedly calm message.
“Errrrrrrm,” he said as he rounded Brooklands. “I think something happened to my left tyre also.”
His tyre had failed. Verstappen was just over half a minute behind. Mercedes told him to lock the differential and Hamilton focused on minimising loads he was putting through the front left.
He dropped more than five seconds to Verstappen from Luffield to Copse then nine seconds by Chapel, as Verstappen asked his engineer “can we win this?” and got the blunt reply: “If you get on with it.”
Crucially, Hamilton stemmed the time loss with an aggressive final sector. Verstappen was 10 seconds behind at Stowe but a big spurt of throttle from Hamilton down to the Club complex, and him somehow keeping it on-track despite badly locking the wrecked tyre, was more than enough.
He limped through the final complex, race engineer Peter Bonnington counting down the seconds all the while.
292s: Rivals curse their luck – and Hamilton’s
Hamilton crossed the line to a mix of ecstasy, confusion and relief.
“Is that the last lap?!” he asked.
“That’s it mate, you’ve done it!” Bonnington yelled back. “You’ve done it! Oh, that’s it, mate.”
Verstappen’s radio was colourful but in the opposite direction. A pair of “fuck sake” messages before his record-breaking lap was even over, knowing Hamilton was too far down the road, and then after the flag: “Ah, fuck sake, mate! Fuck!”
It’s impossible to say how much Verstappen’s slow out-lap was crucial to his bonza final tour. Had he pushed harder, perhaps that last lap wouldn’t have been as rapid.
A mix of his conservatism on what turned out to be an in-lap after Bottas’s puncture, plus the preparation for his fastest-lap effort, did cost him a few seconds though.
Would it have overhauled Hamilton? Not on its own.
But the immense difficulty of that final half a lap for Hamilton would have been intensified further with the Red Bull bearing down on him, the margin for error reduced even further, and potentially there would’ve been only a couple of seconds in it through the final couple of corners.
“Shit, we shouldn’t have even had second,” Verstappen said over the radio. “But when you have this…
“Ah, anyway, it’s still good.”
The aftermath: Who got it right?
Mercedes has breathed a sigh of relief post-race and both driver and team have admitted that, on reflection, utilising the free pitstop would have been the correct decision. So, it got this wrong, but got lucky.
Red Bull and Verstappen though have dug their heels in and insisted it was not worth looking at this race as a win lost, but a second place gained.
“I could also pick up a puncture, and I could lose a lot more,” Verstappen reflected.
“That’s the thing, it’s always so easy to say afterwards that we should have just continued – but who would have said that Lewis would have got a puncture? How often does this happen?
“Normally, never. So, I don’t regret anything.”
Horner concurred: “We’ll be grateful for what we’ve got. Rather than what we’ve potentially lost.”
Certainly, Red Bull can’t look back at those chaotic few minutes with as much disappointment as Bottas, whose title hopes have taken a hit if not been torn apart quite as dramatically as his front-left tyre.
But in Bottas’s defiance that he will continue pushing for the championship in the knowledge that anything is possible is the very argument for Red Bull and Verstappen taking a chance at the very end.
“Lewis obviously had a good race but he also got away with it in a way,” said Bottas.
“I mean, what can I do? What can I say? It’s not ideal but you can’t change what has happened.
“I just need to move on and take the learnings from this weekend, try again next weekend and keep positive.
“Because if I were to decide myself now, ‘OK, it’s done’ – I’m definitely not going to do that.
“I’ll keep pushing, believing and you just never know what will happen. That’s a fact.”
That mindset could have yielded a different winner in the chaotic conclusion to the British GP. But the truth is we’ll never know conclusively if the drama could have had an even greater twist.
