Lewis Hamilton has won the German Grand Prix, thus extending his World Driver Championship lead to 19-points.
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Red Bull duo Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen joined Hamilton on the podium.
After Rosberg won four successive races at the start of what is proving to be a roller-coaster campaign, Hamilton has burst back with six victories in seven races heading into F1’s summer holidays.
“I definitely feel different compared to being six points ahead”, said Hamilton, referring to his gap to Rosberg following his win one week earlier in Hungary.
Finishing the race fourth, Rosberg was 2.432s behind third-placed Max Verstappen, and while, all things considered, it is arguable whether without the timing error the German would have finished ahead of the Dutchman it was an error the Mercedes driver could have done without. Rosberg also picked up a five-second penalty and had to settle for fourth, after winning the Hockenheim race two years ago.
Ferrari’s form has faded over recent races and the best Sebastian Vettel could manage on his first appearance for the team on his home soil was a distant fifth ahead of stablemate Kimi Raikkonen. His teammate Perez recovered from a poor start to end the race at 10th and took one point. Verstappen overtook Ricciardo from the outside as they raced into the first corner but Ricciardo later regained the second place to finish 6.9 seconds behind Hamilton.
While Rosberg struggled to make any inroads behind the two Red Bulls, Hamilton was able to cruise to victory despite turning down his engine in an attempt to expand its shelf-life. “19 points is not tough”, he said, but quickly added that it might take some time before he gets over a GP that went “completely wrong”.
The stewards investigated the incident, and the Mercedes driver was given a five second time penalty which resulted in him falling back down to P4 after his final pitstop. “We kept Nico (Rosberg) behind us on fair pace so that was good”. Today I’m very disappointed because I had an awesome qualifying yesterday and I was feeling good.
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“Overall, I think we can be very pleased with our first part of the year, 11 wins from 12 is a nice statistic to take into the summer break but we know that our rivals are continuing to improve, too”.
