Hamilton extended his lead to 19 points by winning Sunday’s German Grand Prix.
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Although Nico Rosberg was slapped with a five-second time penalty in the German GP, a broken stopwatch over at Mercedes meant it ran for eight seconds.
His Red Bull team-mate Ricciardo marked his 100th Grand Prix by finishing ahead of Verstappen because he had the best of their alternative strategies for tyres, as they out-raced Ferrari to move ahead of the Italian team in the constructors’ championship. Rosberg was awarded and would serve a five second penalty for the infraction, enough to push him from second back to fourth.
Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen crossed the line in fifth and sixth for Ferrari while Jenson Button finished eighth for McLaren after passing the Williams of Valtteri Bottas on the penultimate lap.
“Without the penalty I was in front of the Red Bulls; with the penalty I couldn’t challenge them”.
Heading into the summer break, Lewis Hamilton has earned a strong lead of 19 points. “I think we played well as a team”.
Not wanting to take anything away from Nico, who is a very good driver and has driven some fantastic races with many race wins, seems that he isn’t able to live up to his teammate’s standards.
However, he said he was still aware of the fact that he would nearly certainly lose ground again to Rosberg at one of the next two races in Belgium and Italy, following the four-week summer break.
His Mercedes F1 team boss Toto Wolff said: “Lewis has great talent and speed and on a good day I think he’s unbeatable. We have worked very, very hard”, Hamilton said after Sunday’s dominant victory at the Hockenheimring.
At pole position on the grid in the final race, Rosberg had a bad start pushing his position to four, which Hamilton as well as Red Bull utilised to their advantage with the former leading the race from turn one with a gap of 1.3 seconds.
Ricciardo added: “This is two weekends in a row on the podium and one of the most refreshing things is seeing all the fans back in Germany”.
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After his victory in Hungary, which enabled him to take charge of the championship for the first time this year, Hamilton described his spectacular collision with Rosberg in Barcelona as the turning point of his season.
