Opinion: Can this F1 season get any more dramatic?

It’s not often the winner of an F1 race comes from 14th on the grid and it’s not often that the leader of the race crashes out when he has a good lead. This all happened on Sunday and there was so much chaos and drama.

The drama started when Lewis Hamilton lost his hydraulics and tried to push hic car to the pitlane even though he was quite a distance away from the entry to the pits. Mercedes and Hamilton say that the something happened to the car which caused Hamilton to go wide at turn one and go over the bumpy run-off. In other words, it wasn’t Hamilton’s fault and his bumpy excursion did not play a part to his car coming to a halt.

After the Austrian GP, Mercedes discovered that a hydraulic line inside the steering column was vibrating excessively due to high loads, causing Bottas’s DNF. Toto Wolff suspects the same thing happened on Hamilton’s car in Q1. The biggest loads came from Hamilton’s off at turn one.

A lot of people won’t agree with me but I actually think that it was Hamilton’s fault. I don’t think he had a problem which caused him to go off at turn one. It all looked normal to me and the Brit just took too much speed into the corner and didn’t quite hit the apex perfectly. The steering looked fine to me as well. So yes, I am saying that I think Mercedes are lying and they are just trying to cover up Hamilton’s mistake.

I may be completely wrong and we should really be taking the team’s word. But this is my opinion and I do think that Hamilton should have backed out as soon as he knew he wasn’t going to make the corner. To keep your foot in it whilst going over the bumps wasn’t the smartest thing to do. It also wasn’t a good idea to not listen to his engineer, Peter Bonnington, when he was told multiple times to stop the car because of a power unit risk.

It didn’t matter in the end but it did not look good at the time with rival Sebastian Vettel starting on pole position at his home race and any chance of gaining points on Vettel were low.

An absolute downpour of rain came down on Saturday in FP3 but it dried out for qualifying. Similar thunderstorms were expected during the race and normally in F1 it doesn’t rain when everyone thinks it will. This time though it did, and it changed the race massively.

Before that, we saw Kimi Raikkonen in the lead and Ferrari had a bit of a conundrum. Raikkonen had undercut Bottas and Vettel so when Vettel pitted he came out behind his teammate. I don’t get what Ferrari were doing with Raikkonen, unless they were trying to strategise the race around the “inevitable” weather. That would have been very silly though and surely you would treat your strategy as if it was going to be a dry race.

It meant that Raikkonen eventually had to make way for Vettel despite Raikkonen’s best attempt to ask the team to make the team directly order him to get out of the way before the Finn got out of the throttle and made things easy for Vettel. It was the right thing to do because Bottas wasn’t too far behind and Vettel was clearly faster.

Hamilton pitted on lap 42 to remove his soft tyres that he started on and put on a brand new set of ultrasoft tyres. It was his long and very fast soft tyre stint where he didn’t push too hard when overtaking cars and didn’t slide too much when in the turbulent air, that got Hamilton into contention for the win. Even if Vettel hadn’t crashed, Hamilton would have been so much faster at the end because Ferrari were pretty poor on strategy. If they were trying a 2 stopper with Raikkonen, they should have made Raikkonen’s second pitstop just before Hamilton’s. That said, they may have been watching the radars, knowing that rain was going to come.

It was very hard to read the race strategy up and down the field.

Then, Vettel crashed out from the lead at the Sachs Curve. He had nearly a 10 second lead and was pushing very hard considering the lead he had. Perhaps the team told him that Hamilton was lapping quickly which made Vettel push on. Who knows? It was a small error in which the German braked slightly too late and there are reports that it was raining very hard just a dozen or so seconds before Vettel got to that area of the track.

He was unlucky in some ways that had it been on a different part of the track where there was run-off then he would have got away with it. We saw Sergio Perez spin and get away with it, numerous drivers run wide elsewhere on the track but Vettel made a mistake at the wrong moment and at the wrong time. He should have been much more careful and with his experience you wouldn’t expect a mistake like he made.

Nobody else walked it off the track there. Some may argue that the small front wing endplate that he lost at the final corner a few laps before may have contributed to his off. Perhaps it did but I have no idea how much an endplate contributes in downforce. I doubt it would have saved his incident.

Remember, Vettel locked up and went wide at Baku when he went for an overtake on Valtteri Bottas for the lead. He did it again on Sunday in Germany but this time it will really hurt. He said he wouldn’t lose sleep over the win, I do not believe that for one second. He just lost his home race, somewhere where he hasn’t won and may never win again, through his own error and it was all set up perfectly for him

Vettel’s crash created a safety car which saw Bottas pit but lose a lot of time in the pitstop because the team didn’t have his tyres ready. There was a confusion over whether intermediates or slicks were the right tyres to put on the car. Was Hamilton going to come in? So much going on.

At least they didn’t do what Ferrari did with Raikkonen which was to do a lap behind the safety car and then come in. Had Raikkonen followed Bottas in, which would be the normal thing to do, he would have jumped him because Bottas’s pitstop was so slow. Maybe Raikkonen could then have attacked Hamilton hard at the end to take his first win in five years. Ferrari got the strategy wrong yet again and it may have cost dearly.

Now we come to the controversial incident in the race. Hamilton was going to come into the pits but then at the last minute decided to stay out but crossed the white line to come back onto the track when he shouldn’t have. The stewards gave him a reprimand, nearly three hours after the incident itself I must add.

The reasoning is stupid from the stewards. The statement said it wasn’t too bad a move because “it was done under safety car” which made it a “less dangerous” move and the “team admitted the mistake”. The reason I’m not happy is for a few reasons.

Why are the white lines and the bollard there in the first place if you can cut across the track like that? There should be nothing. Also, in the future if you’re in the lead under a safety car and unsure to pit with rivals behind, you can pretend to come into the pits and then jump back across to the main track like Hamilton did if you see your rivals not pitting. If it’s worth a reprimand then why not do it?

Does the fact it’s under safety car matter? Vettel drove into Hamilton under safety car last year at Baku under safety car conditions. I won’t get into that but if you cause a collision under safety car then you should still get a tough penalty because you caused a collision. If you break a rule under the safety car, like Hamilton did in my opinion, you should get a race penalty.

A reprimand is a penalty, I understand that but it’s not a race penalty and it’s far too lenient. I get the argument that you should use common sense and had he pitted anyway then he may have won and that a 5 or 10 second time penalty is used for incidents that are much worse than that. But those penalties should be harsher and the whole penalty and judicial system really needs to be looked at.

There’s still no consistency and the stewards it seems only noticed that Hamilton had broken a rule after the race. How did they not notice it during the race with all of the people and cameras that they have. Pretty ridiculous from the stewards.

I do feel that this is payback (in a good way) for Hamilton after he was severely penalised in Spa, Belgium 2008 for cutting the Bus Stop chicane and not letting a big enough gap go to the leader after gaining a clear advantage. Also, I feel that the stewards desperately didn’t want to change the result after all of the public had switched off their TVs. It would be bad for the sport if the winner of the race changed hands after the on track action was finished.

I can see why people will disagree that the penalty wasn’t harsh enough but I hope people understand my point of view. It’s a tough one but the stewards have set the bar so low for incidents which result in a time penalty that something like Hamilton’s cut across the track can only get a reprimand.

It was ultimately Hamilton’s call to stay out and not pit amid the confusion. A masterful drive was topped off with skilful defence on his teammate as Bottas switched his tyres on and got alongside his teammate going down towards the hairpin. It was brilliant to see Bottas being so aggressive, even on his teammate.

Hamilton covered the move and the only thing I can criticise Bottas for was that he could have had a cheeky look down the inside in the braking zone for the hairpin but it would have made the angle for the turn in for the hairpin itself very awkward. Plus, I’m using hindsight and not travelling at nearly 200MPH in slippery conditions.

Bottas got the call to not attack Hamilton, like the Ferrari call to Raikkonen, was the correct decision. I know a lot of people who get frustrated over team orders, but remember the teams pay the money for the teams championship, and the drives title doesn’t pay a penny. With about F200 million at stake, which championship would you give priority? Sure, we hate team orders, but it’s not our money. For the team it’s the right thing.

So much more happened in the race and I’ve only talked about Mercedes and Ferrari.