Lewis Hamilton hadn’t realised that he’d knocked the cover off his brake bias switch on his first Q3 run. It’s on the side of the steering wheel and normally he doesn’t actually change the setting much during the Austin lap. But he was puzzled that he was getting a bit of rear instability under braking. So he started moving it forward. But without the cover, unbeknown to him, it kept winding itself rearwards on his second run. That’s essentially why he qualified fifth.
He was never going to win the race from there, with team-mate Valtteri Bottas in the only other car as quick as Lewis’s, starting from pole. Bottas is in fine form at the moment and to put three cars between him and Hamilton and expect the latter to win wasn’t realistic. But Hamilton didn’t see it that way, which is part of why he’s the multiple champion he is. “The whole time I was focusing only on where I was in relation to Valtteri.”
He’d cleared two of those three cars between him and his quarry – both of them Ferraris – before the race was eight corners old. But that still left Max Verstappen’s Red Bull in the way. “I wasn’t interested in my gap to the car in second,” explained Hamilton. “I wanted to win.”
