This was no fluke, insisted Lewis Hamilton after his stunning German Grand Prix victory. This was years in the making. Hamilton took full advantage of Sebastian Vettel’s crash to win a dramatic race at Hockenheim and regain the championship lead from his rival.
Having never previously won from lower than sixth on the grid, maximum points for Hamilton seemed implausible on Sunday morning. He was stunned by the nature of his German Grand Prix win on Sunday. He started from 14th after a hydraulic failure ruined his qualifying and left him slumped by his stricken machine on Saturday.
But the stars aligned as Hamilton ruthlessly cut through the field 24 hours later, before expertly negotiating the rain and rightly ignoring his team’s order to pit late on. It allowed him to capitalise as his rivals fell away, Vettel most spectacularly so when he buried his Ferrari in the wall from the lead with 15 laps left.
There was more drama to come as a stewards’ investigation into that aborted pit-stop plunged Hamilton’s victory into doubt for almost three hours after the race. But that too went Hamilton’s way as he received just a slap on the wrist. Finally given the chance to sit down and contemplate the magnitude of his achievement, a reflective Hamilton fought back the tears as he recalled honing his skills during his junior karting days.
‘I put everything I had into the race,’ he said. ‘I always do but I managed to have more. Every single lap was as I had planned. It was very reminiscent of how I started out. My dad bought a kart which was really old and had been owned by five different families. He spent a bit of money to shave it down and respray it. I think he went to Halfords or whatever and made it as brand new as it could be but he would call it a four-poster bed. I would always start at the back and have to wiggle my way through the more experienced and faster cars. That’s where I learnt to do it, that’s what I was best at doing. Saturday was a difficult day. When I was sat by the car, I wasn’t in tears but I was heartbroken.
‘Ultimately every time there is a day like this, there’s always a chance to show what you can do and driving from the back is so much more fun than driving from the front. But you never know how far you can go. Sometimes you get the shorter straw, sometimes you can go the distance.’
Doing the latter means Hamilton takes a commanding 17-point lead to Hungary this week. But his Mercedes boss says it is not yet time for the team to throw their full weight behind his world title defence. Victory ended a rotten run for Hamilton, who retired from the Austrian Grand Prix three weeks ago. A week later, Vettel denied him a fifth straight victory on home tarmac at Silverstone when he was shunted by Kimi Raikkonen after three corners.
But the German’s catastrophic error on Sunday means Hamilton takes renewed belief and momentum to Budapest, the first of 10 remaining races. However, Toto Wolff says it is too early for the team to favour Hamilton, despite ordering team-mate Valtteri Bottas to stop challenging him in the closing laps on Sunday.
‘We always said that if the championship goes into the last third or last quarter and there’s a big difference between the drivers we might make these unpopular calls,’ said Wolff. But it’s much too early in the season to do this. We did it here to bring a one and two home and we would have done it had the drivers been the other way around. It was chaos. They were all over each other which is fair enough. But it was still raining and we had so much bad luck in last couple of races, the scenario of losing a car or two was just something I didn’t want. It all changed in our favour,’ added Wolff. ‘We got the luck back that we didn’t have in the last few races, either by losing points to accidents or the double retirement in Austria. But we got the one-two back today.’