The whole build-up on Sunday morning was spent watching radars and checking the skies, with dark clouds surround the circuit but the track itself bathed in sunshine. If the sun stayed out, it would be a tougher race for the soft compound tyre compared to if it clouded over. Any rain would really throw a spanner in the works.
As the rain sat under two miles away but didn’t arrive pre-race, the tyre blankets coming off on the grid revealed Red Bull taking a different approach to the rest. Verstappen and Perez would start on mediums, the rest on softs save for Charles Leclerc and Logan Sargeant on hards and mediums respectively from the pitlane.
What that did was increase the potential for Sainz and Norris to attack, as their soft tyres would provide more grip off the line on the long run to Turn 1. And Sainz duly did, trying round the outside as Verstappen went defensive but failing to hold on.
Verstappen leads away as Norris is squeezed
Getty Images via Red Bull
Behind, Lewis Hamilton had got the better of Norris into the first corner and then the McLaren driver clumsily clipped the left rear of his countryman, damaging his front wing and requiring a first lap pitstop for a change and that ultimately ruined his afternoon.
“Everyone just checked up, I wasn’t on the inside,” Norris said. “It was just racing, I was just unlucky, that was all.”
Hamilton survived the contact but Lance Stroll took advantage of the situation with a strong start of his own, passing Norris at Turn 3 and then Hamilton down the inside of Turn 5 after hanging tough round the outside one corner earlier. But it soon became clear the Aston Martin didn’t have the pace of the Mercedes, and nor did the Ferrari.
Hamilton was back ahead of Stroll by lap eight, going around the outside on the brakes into Turn 1 just one lap after George Russell had cleared Fernando Alonso for sixth. Both drivers had made good starts – Russell running wide at Turn 1 but facing no investigation – and by the time Russell had overtaken Esteban Ocon for fifth place at Turn 1 it was clear the Mercedes had a tyre advantage.
Stroll couldn’t contain Hamilton for long
Joan Valls/Urbanandsport via Getty Images
Others such as Nico Hülkenberg had already swapped softs for mediums a number of laps earlier as he dropped rapidly through the field, while Perez made solid progress after an unspectacular start, passing the impressive Zhou Guanyu for eighth with a clinical move and getting his medium tyres working well.
Sainz had suggested he had pace in hand while running second but as Hamilton closed in he appeared to have no response, so took to the pits on lap 15, opting for mediums for the second stint. But three laps later Russell told his team “I’ve got a lot more pace in these tyres, we need to look forwards not back,” as both he and Hamilton delayed their first stops.
There were eventually nine laps between Sainz and Hamilton’s first pitstops and although the seven-time world champion emerged behind it took him just four laps to clear the Ferrari and set off after Verstappen.
Well, you could say set off… There were periods when Hamilton’s pace was comparable, but on the whole Verstappen just continued to control his advantage after switching to hard tyres, his only area of concerning surrounding the racking up of track limit infringements.
Verstappen had little to worry about behind him, but was warned over breaching white lines
Grand Prix Photo
“I went over the white line three times!” Verstappen said. “It happens sometimes, some tracks it’s a bit easier to do and I was struggling a little bit with the harder tires to keep it within the white lines, but I knew once of course I had that last warning that I had to keep it within the white lines, but it’s not an issue really.”
Perhaps rain would have spiced things up but the threat was receding, even if Russell mistook sweat on the inside of his visor for spots falling. It was a strategy race instead, with the various approaches showing up who was good on their tyres and who was struggling.
Aston Martin was surprisingly not a factor in such a race, with Alonso working his way into seventh place behind Stroll – a close call with Ocon into Turn 1 the final move to get himself there – but unable to stay in touch with the top three teams.
Sainz was also fading, losing out to Russell six laps after Hamilton had come through. The second Mercedes was late on the brakes into Turn 1 and responded to his race engineer’s “solid work” message with, “just solid?” to which Toto Wolff jumped on the radio to add: “It was pretty good.”
