Lewis Hamilton could retire from a grand prix and get beaten by Mercedes team-mate Valtteri Bottas in the next race and still lead the Formula 1 championship battle. With almost one-third of the season expected to take place in 2020 complete, his advantage is a very strong one.
It doesn’t mean Hamilton can start planning where he’ll put a record-equalling seventh championship trophy in his home, of course. But Bottas’s late-race puncture at the British Grand Prix was a deflating moment for his own hopes, and those of others keen on a close title fight.
“It could be much more interesting than many people were afraid of two weeks ago” :: Toto Wolff
Being Hamilton’s team-mate automatically makes Bottas his likeliest challenger. But Bottas’s failure in the British GP isn’t the one that costing F1 a close title fight.
An unexpected but emphatic victory for Max Verstappen in the second Silverstone race launched him above Bottas in the drivers’ championship. It’s easy to forget that Verstappen has now finished first, second and second in his last three races. Even easier to forget he lost a probable second place, maybe even victory, in the season opener.
Verstappen’s DNF in the Austrian Grand Prix feels a lifetime ago but the flywheel-related failure now looks incredibly costly. Even if we assume he wouldn’t have been able to challenge for victory – though had it been Verstappen, not Alex Albon, making the switch for softer tyres under the safety car, it’s difficult to see the race playing out as it did – we can add at least 15 points to his score.
Really, Verstappen could be anywhere between five and 12 points behind Hamilton. It’s hard not to look back on that Austrian GP failure without thinking ‘what if’.
“For Formula 1 it would be very exciting and also for us as a team,” Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said of the prospect of a Verstappen vs Hamilton title fight.
“We embrace the challenge and we love to fight and certainly they are a strong competitor and Max is a very good driver.
“And if you consider that they had a full DNF at the beginning of the season, that gap is not large. It would only be five points behind and not 30.
“We’re up for a fight and it looks like this could be a tough season between the three of them because I wouldn’t write off Valtteri.
“There’s maybe 10 more races to go. DNFs can quickly make the points swing and it could be much more interesting than many people were afraid of two weeks ago.”
There are two obvious initial caveats to reimagining Verstappen as a title contender without that race-one setback.
The first is that Verstappen was damned fortunate to finish second in Hungary – well, not to finish second, because he drove superbly. But he was damned fortunate to start the race given he crashed on his way to the grid. And his second place in the British GP was after Bottas’s puncture, so he gained from that whereas Hamilton did not.
To achieve the narrative of a Verstappen title bid, you either need the points he’s lacking or you have to get creative with probabilities
The second caveat is that the Red Bull is not a match for Mercedes in qualifying or in most conditions, even though it is closer on Sundays. So while Verstappen made hay while the sun shone at Silverstone, and may do so again at Barcelona, it seems likely that Verstappen would just be artificially close and slip back pretty quickly when normal order resumes in subsequent races.
But…that’s not really how racing works. The fastest car doesn’t always win – or at least doesn’t always have it easy. Who is to say Verstappen, if he had Hamilton within touching distance, wouldn’t launch the sort of gritty, persistent, underdog challenge Fernando Alonso produced in a not-really-quick-enough Ferrari in 2012?
Wolff might be overplaying it when he says there is a Mercedes vs Red Bull title battle in the making. Because Verstappen’s very unlikely to take massive chunks out of a 30-point deficit to a faster car. But what if he’d just finished in Austria, and was working from five points, or 12 points, or 15 points behind? It’s a frustrating thought.
Still, he is at least close enough to keep the Mercedes boys looking over their shoulders.
“I kind of enjoy the situation because everybody was saying, this is going to be a walk in the park for Mercedes,” insists Wolff. “And here we go. That [the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix] wasn’t at all a walk in the park.”
Hamilton added: “I want to have races where they’re challenging like today so I’m excited to watch this race.
“Obviously the Red Bull seems to be quite close in race conditions to us and [at Silverstone] was stronger so it shows they don’t have as bad a package as perhaps people had said in the past but I think it’s good.
“It will be interesting to see the progression through the rest of the year and I definitely will not overlook them.
“We’ve got to keep a close eye on them and keep working to push forwards because I don’t think it’s going to be easy by any means.”
Let’s imagine, then, that this weekend’s Spanish GP is how everybody expects it to be – very hot with tyres critical around another high-energy circuit.
Best-case scenario for Verstappen on Sunday, Bottas grows frustrated playing second fiddle to Hamilton and the two Mercedes collide from the front row in a grim repeat of the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix (pictured below). Verstappen wins, the gap’s five points.
A more realistic, but still glass-half-full, prediction is that Verstappen is a legitimate contender for victory, given Mercedes has admitted an element of urgency in its need to understand its issues and make an improvement to avoid “looking silly” on Sunday.
So Verstappen wins, and this time Bottas is the man in second. Then the gap’s 20 points. Within a race victory and some Hamilton drama – OK, that’s more like it. But damn, if only he had those 25/18/15 points, right?
“When we go back to conservative tyres everywhere it will be a bit harder for us” :: Max Verstappen
You see the problem. To achieve the narrative of a Verstappen title bid, you either need the points he’s lacking or you have to get creative with probabilities. And Mercedes and Hamilton are six-time world champions, gunning for seven, because they very rarely allow themselves to get caught out by long odds.
Without a performance step, Verstappen and Red Bull are likely to get precious few opportunities to repeat their sensational form from last Sunday.
“To fully close that gap will be very hard,” reckons Verstappen. “I think [at Silverstone] we were just very good on tyres and then you can push a lot harder on them.
“When we go back to conservative tyres everywhere – because basically most of the tracks we go to we are just doing a one stop – it will be a bit harder for us because then nobody really has blistering that severe, and you don’t need to manage as much as we did today.
“We will see. Let’s just enjoy [the win] and then we’ll see again in Barcelona where we are.”
And that’s the underlying, frustrating reality of Verstappen’s situation. Maybe it can happen. He’d be a brilliant opponent for Hamilton in the title fight. And you can see how badly everybody else wants it to happen because one victory and the lost hope of 2020 is suddenly burning brightly again.
But like Bottas, Verstappen’s missing the points he should have to make you really believe it’s possible.
And at least Bottas knows he has a car capable of fighting for victory on a normal Sunday.
