Defending champion Lewis Hamilton produced a trademark triumph of pace and panache to win Sunday s Hungarian Grand Prix ahead of his Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg and replace him as leader of this year s world title race.
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Daniel Ricciardo of Red Bull took third, less than a second ahead of Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel, who put in an incredible late-race rally.
His fifth victory in six races means he has turned a 43-point deficit into a six-point lead in that time.
Leading from the beginning of the race to the end, he overtook Mercedes team-mate, Nico Rosberg on the long-run to turn in at number one. “I tried to miss him and I just managed to, but there were two times that in my feelings it wasn’t correct”, said Raikkonen. Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Ferrari were quite close in terms of performance at Hungary.
Rosberg, who has also won five races this year, will have the chance to seize back the lead in his home German Grand Prix. Schumacher won in Top Fuel, Allen Johnson in Pro Stock and Andrew Hines in Pro Stock Motorcycle.
“It was the best drive of my career but then I spun and we didn’t get any points”.
After the Final Practise on Saturday, where Rosberg managed to grab the pole position, and being cleared from an investigation over a yellow flag infringement issue.
Most drivers opted for the two pitstop strategy running on softs and then supersofts with the sun shining brightly throughout the 70 laps, even though the qualifying sessions were more of a slush fest.
There was controversy during Sunday’s race as Hamilton appeared at one stage to deliberately attempt to back-up Rosberg into Ricciardo’s Red Bull.
“As I’ve said all the time I’m not counting points, and I also fully expected him to come back, and I didn’t expect to be 48 points ahead all the time”.
“Everything’s still possible and I just want to focus on winning races”.
When Hamilton was asked to clarify whether it was the middle finger, he said: “I may have accidentally wanted to do that!” Jenson’s was the only retirement of the Hungarian GP.
Since Hamilton and Rosberg crashed out of the Spanish Grand Prix in May, however, the former has scored 49 more points than his team-mate.
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This left Rosberg only seven-tenths behind, but Hamilton responded with a fastest lap to re-open the gap to 1.1 seconds and soon extended it to 2.9 seconds. Eventually, Red Bull’s Max Verstappen sealed the fifth place, with Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen right on his tail.
