Lewis Hamilton picked up an unexpected victory in a wild Azerbaijan Grand Prix, benefiting from a late-race error by Sebastian Vettel and a puncture for his Mercedes team-mate Valtteri Bottas.
Vettel led much of the race on the streets of Baku in his Ferrari until stopping for new tyres, with Bottas able to benefit by holding out for his stop until a late-race safety car. That allowed him to emerge in the lead ahead of Vettel and Hamilton.
Then Vettel’s attempt to reclaim the lead at the restart ended with him locking up and running wide, allowing both Hamilton and Kimi Räikkönen to go past. The German then lost another spot to Force India’s Sergio Pérez.
The drama wasn’t over, because Bottas’s bid to win a second race in 2018 ended when a tyre blew in dramatic fashion after he ran over some debris. That gifted Hamilton an unlikely win – and, with it, the championship lead.
Here are more takeaways from the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
Hamilton: we have work to do
Despite claiming his first victory of the season, world champion Hamilton admitted that both he and Mercedes have work to do to match Ferrari.
“I’m definitely struggling to extract the car’s potential, but also my potential. It’s definitely been a little difficult, but I have to be happy with today.
“We’ve definitely got a lot of work still to do: we still are behind [Ferrari]. We’ve not got a terrible car by any means; we’ve just got to refine it a little bit.”
Hamilton also acknowledged Bottas’s bad luck, adding: “He deserved to win. He did an exceptional job; a faultless drive. I couldn’t have got by him if he hadn’t had that tyre blowout.”
Vettel might have rued the ill-timed safety car that cost him victory but, given his win in the season-opening Australian Grand Prix was due to a well-timed safety car, he didn’t complain too much.
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Can't wait for Monaco
Just imagine, two Red Bulls on the front row, both drivers told not to crash into each other...
Yesterday's action was inevitable given two determinendly aggressive drivers vying for the same piece of tarmac in equal cars. Red Bull should either impose team orders or put their drivers on different strategies. That way, they'd spend more time racing their competitors and less each other - and in an unpredictable race they'd have more options.
Still, it was fun to watch - and for once they can't plame their engine supplier.
Better solution
Virtual safety car (they'd sometimes use it anyway), close the pit lane and in the unlikely event anyone absolutely needs to go in make them wait in their box for 20 seconds to negate the advantage.
Max PerCrashen should be a passenger in the safety car for the next race too
Safety Car Wins (yet again)
That’s 3 out of 4 races decided by when the safety car is deployed. If this decides the championship at the last race of the year the BBC HYS section will go into melt down!
It’s wrong and happens to often!
So how about this then.....
For every Lap the Safety Car is out add one lap, to make this viable make the Cars carry extra fuel say ten litres?, well of course it wouldn’t work but a safety has to deployed for the Cars and Marshall’s around the Track, this was just a weird Race where a Drivers did daft things and I had forecast that the Redbulls would crash not just in that order though, and then Vettel did the daft thing and trued to pass Bottas to soon, but, there’s the result, next Race please....!