Toto Wolff warned him before the weekend: the last time Netflix was recording with them, in 2019, they starred in the worst race of the year. Without going to this extreme, it cannot be said that the platform’s cameras have recorded what they expected. Mercedes won in Russia, as always when Formula 1 has raced there, but it was not the one in the script: Valtteri Bottas beat Max Verstappen yaun Lewis Hamilton postponing for at least two weeks equaling Michael Schumacher’s record of 91 wins.
The British race was put uphill before the start. When he was taking the start to get on the grid, his engineer Peter Bonington committed a serious mistake when explaining a specification in the standard. Hamilton asked if he could do the race tests outside the designated place, thinking that he could only receive a fine or a mere warning. The engineer said yes. And it cost him dearly. Immediately at that time, the FIA announced an investigation whose verdict it gave when the start had already been taken.
Hamilton was met with a double penalty of 5 seconds, for a total of 10 that left him without options. His anger, both with the FIA and with his engineer, was remarkable. They no longer know what to do to slow us down, he lamented. The great beneficiary of this action was Bottas, who had an acceptable start despite the fact that, as he later confessed, a bee had gotten into the cockpit and was bothering him during the first bars of the race.
By now, the first two dropouts from the race had already occurred, both by accident. Almost simultaneously, but in different areas, Lance Stroll went against the wall with his Racing Point and Carlos Sainz ran into the peak of the second turn of the circuit and destroyed the McLaren and its options.
The driving error of the Madrid native was rude, and his anger at it the same. Sainz was wrong when measuring the speed he had to go through to do the ‘slalom’ between the expanded polystyrene panels and figuratively swallowed the apex of the wall. Second consecutive zero by accident and fifth of the season, which represents a very poor booty for the Spanish rider, especially after having achieved the podium at Monza two races ago.
The record of the day was Räikkönen
Once the sanction was served, Hamilton was totally unexpected in eleventh place and forced to come back. The first seven positions were relatively easy, but when it was possible to place in third place the wall was impassable.
The freedom with which Bottas and Verstappen rode on the nondescript Sochi track meant that the distances did not move much at any time. With the Finn hovering around 10 seconds over the Dutch and this another 10 over Hamilton, soon the ‘status quo’ of the race was completely stabilized, at least in the top six.
The fights for the sixth, the tenth and the thirteenth began to gain prominence, even with a sanction to Daniel Ricciardo or the usual Romain Grosjean for going beyond the track limits where they should not, although this was a small note at the bottom of the evolution of the race.
Thus, in a Grand Prix where all eyes were to be on Lewis Hamilton and his record of 91 victories, equaling the mark of Michael Schumacher. But who achieved the only statistical milestone of this test was Kimi Räikkönen. The Finnish veteran reached the 322 races that the Brazilian Rubens Barrichello played, another ex-Ferrari driver. From Argentina, where he is still competing at 48 in the TC2000 championship at the wheel of a Toyota GR, he congratulated the Finn for matching his figure and warned him: “Alonso is coming, so keep running, huh?” The Asturian has not landed … but that’s it.
Formula 1 leaves Russia, where there has been an audience in the stands for the first time this season (beyond the few toilets they paid tribute to at Monza), and in two weeks it will visit the legendary Nürburgring circuit for the Eifel Grand Prix, as they have baptized him. It will be interesting to see Formula 1 in the ‘green hell’, where this weekend they have contested the traditional 24-hour test under heavy rain that forced the night session to be canceled.
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