Hamilton comes out on top at Portuguese Grand Prix

A pair of impressive overtaking manoeuvres saw Lewis Hamilton storm to victory at the Portuguese Grand Prix.

It left his only serious competition, Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and teammate Valtteri Bottas, languishing behind in second and third respectively, their battle for fastest lap being the major site of competition.

Bottas began on pole, but the race was swiftly put on hold with a safety car – Kimi Raikkonen drove into the back of his teammate Antonio Giovinazzi on lap two which caused his own retirement in the process. The race restarted on lap seven, with Bottas retaining his lead and Verstappen overtaking Hamilton, the champion making an uncharacteristically poor start. Verstappen started piling the pressure on Bottas, but he didn’t have long until he needed to defend his own position.

A little oversteer from Verstappen on lap 10 gave Hamilton the opportunity to pass, and he took it. Then, come lap 20, he moved to pass Bottas, taking a lead he was never going to lose unless he fell victim to horrendous errors. None came.

There was a battle for second now, and the decisive moments came with the pit stops. Red Bull bought Verstappen in on lap 35, and Bottas a lap later – the Mercedes driver couldn’t emerge in time to hold onto the position, and a slide on turn three meant he was doomed to finish in third. The top three places were now sealed, so both Verstappen and Bottas went for the fastest lap time. Verstappen initially succeeded, but his time was deleted for exceeding track limits, granting the bonus point to Bottas.

Sergio Perez took fourth for Red Bull, and Lando Norris rounded out the top five. Charles Leclerc finished in a solid sixth for Ferrari, while his teammate Carlos Sainz finished in 11th, a disappointing finish as his tyres were obviously struggling towards the end of the race.

One of the few other incidents came courtesy of Nikita Mazepin, who was given a penalty point for holding up Sergio Perez, causing him to lose two seconds. Mazepin was also awarded a five-second time penalty, but that made little difference to his 19th-place finish.

After the race, Hamilton said: “That was such a tough race, physically and mentally, keeping everything together. I didn’t quite get as good a start as Valtteri and then lost out at the restart which was not good.

There’s a lot to download from today, improvements we can make. It wasn’t all perfect so we will look at those points

– Lewis Hamilton

“I had to try and reposition myself best I could, I think Max made a mistake at some point and that was perfect. With Valtteri I had to make the move early on before the tyres were destroyed and I just managed to get him at turn one. Right on my limit. Great race. There’s a lot to download from today, improvements we can make. It wasn’t all perfect so we will look at those points.”

Verstappen said: “My race was pretty decent. I had a good restart and then of course, I tried to put the pressure on Valtteri. At the end, I think we just lacked a little bit of pace but overall, Lewis got by again and once after the pit stop, the warm up is super hard on these tyres. Around here we were lacking a bit of pace compared to Mercedes but still, second and fastest lap.”

The Red Bull driver was then told that the lap time had been deleted: “Really? OK. That’s a bit odd because they were not checking track limits at Turn 14. Whatever. This was an odd weekend in terms of grip. We were not on top of it here but we’ll see what we can do in Barcelona.”

Bottas said: “I don’t really know what happened in the first stint. I didn’t have the pace for unknown reasons. After that the second stint was pretty good but there was some issue with a sensor or something. We’ve had a strong package overall today so I don’t really know why in the first stint it didn’t work.”

Next weekend, we head to Spain for the fourth GP of the season. Mercedes have opened up an early lead in both the drivers’ and constructors’ championships, but can Red Bull mount a comeback in Catalonia?