The overarching narrative from this year’s Formula One world championship is – was – Lewis Hamilton’s 43-point deficit to his team-mate and former championship leader Nico Rosberg.
Advertisement
Rosberg’s race unravelled from lights out, as he appeared to get bogged down at the second phase of his start and dropped from first to fourth by Turn 1.
The win means Hamilton creates more separation from Rosberg.
Rosberg actually managed to fight back into a battle for P2.
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.
Mercedes has admitted that a stopwatch failure added to Nico Rosberg’s Hockenheim horror.
Hamilton pitted from the lead on lap 14, three laps later than Rosberg, but was able to retain his lead ahead of Verstappen and Ricciardo. He’ll have good memories of the end of the last season, too, when he finished with the bang, albeit with the title already decided. So I was really optimistic and thinking I could bring it home today.
The German was handed a 5s time penalty after the stewards deemed he had forced Max Verstappen off the road, even though the Mercedes driver insisted that he was on full lock.
He sat out the penalty on his third pit stop but the team appeared to have kept him behind for longer than the five seconds.
Hamilton, who escaped a penalty for an unsafe release in the final practice session, was 0.107 seconds slower than Rosberg.
Rosberg was told to get his head down and focus on opening up a gap to Verstappen behind, something he did in the laps that followed. 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.
Wolff described Rosberg’s race as “a bad day”.
However, when the vehicle entered the pit box the stopwatch failed to start and Rosberg’s total stationary time – including the tyre change – totaled 12 seconds. Once again proving that Ferrari is not a threat to Mercedes, it is Red Bull Racing. Ricciardo followed suit the next time around, coming back out ahead of Verstappen but with his teammate right on his tail.
Advertisement
“Without the penalty I was in front of the Red Bulls; with the penalty I couldn’t challenge them”.
