The worrying moment that could have denied Lewis Hamilton’s iconic British GP win

Lewis Hamilton’s slender lead in the closing stages of the British Grand Prix had Mercedes fretting slightly  as Max Verstappen closed in.

Hamilton won his first race of the ground effect era with a stunning victory at Silverstone, a record-breaking ninth win at one venue, but had to deal with intense pressure being laden on by a pursuing Max Verstappen.

Max Verstappen pace ‘a bit worrying’ as Lewis Hamilton assumes lead

With Verstappen and Red Bull having been off the boil through the changeable conditions in the first half of the British Grand Prix, the Dutch driver came to life in the closing stages as Red Bull fitted his car with the hard compound tyre for an aggressive push to the chequered flag.

Hamilton, who had moved into the lead thanks to an undercut on Lando Norris, had the buffer of the McLaren driver between himself and Verstappen but had to worry about massaging his soft tyres home over the final 13 laps.

Verstappen got his hard tyres fired up immediately, setting fastest lap after fastest lap to reel in the two British drivers ahead of him, and quickly dispatched Norris to move into second and about three seconds behind Hamilton.

But, try as he might, Verstappen couldn’t get close enough to launch a proper attack on Hamilton and ran out of time – ultimately coming home just 1.4 seconds behind his 2021 title rival.

It was the first win ‘on merit’ for Mercedes this year, having claimed victory in Austria seven days prior – a win that had needed some fortune as Verstappen and Norris had clashed while squabbling over the lead. No such fortune was needed at Silverstone, with Mercedes converting their 1-2 grid positions into victory for Hamilton after overcoming a stern challenge from McLaren.

But Andrew Shovlin, head of trackside engineering for Mercedes, explained that tension had been high on the pit wall as the team realised just how quickly Verstappen was going on his fresh hard tyres.

“When you saw him on a different tyre, the first couple of times we put in, that tyre was working well,” he explained in the Mercedes’ debrief after Silverstone.

“We know that they’ve got a very quick car, and it was a bit worrying, because after all of the decisions through all the laps of the race, to have lost it in the final moments would have been really horrible. But yeah, just great that we were able to hang on in there.

“How did I feel in the last few laps? That was quite difficult. I started to relax a little bit with about three or four to go because you could see that Max didn’t really have the pace to cut into Lewis’s lead enough to actually catch him.”

While Hamilton opted for the soft tyre for the final stint, Verstappen proved the hard tyre was strong – perhaps the optimal tyre to be on at that point, despite the colder conditions suggesting it would be tricky to get them up to temperature.

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Shovlin admitted the difference in thinking was simply Mercedes aiming to use the advantage of a rapid soft tyre out-lap to jump Norris and gain track position on the McLaren – something that may not have been possible if the hard tyre hadn’t responded immediately.

“We did have a set of hard tyres. When we were fitting them, we didn’t know that it was going to be as good as it was,” he said.

“So the hard tyre was the right tyre to be on at that part of the race. You saw how strong it was with Max. The big thing though that influenced us was we were trying to do an undercut on Lando.

“We’re transitioning on a track that’s just on the edge of being damp, just moving to dry and our thinking was just that the soft tyre was going to give us the best warm-up, the best chance of making ground on Lando on the out lap to try and take the lead.

“What we hadn’t really expected was the hard to be so good. And you could see that Max was able to close us down in those final stages, but luckily we had enough breathing room to stay ahead until the chequered flag when it matters.”

With Russell having retired from the race with a technical issue, robbing him of a chance of victory and of making it a Mercedes 1-2, Shovlin said the optimism and energy within the team is in abundance after more than two years of struggling to bring home strong results.

“There’s a lot of energy in the team at the moment,” he said.

“We’ve been working hard for months, but now you can start to see the fruits of that work. And there’s more to do. We know that Lando’s particularly quick, we know Max is particularly quick.

“We’d like to try and get ahead of them, and we’ve got a bit to do, but as I said, lots of energy and lots of determination to get there.”

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