Written by Sofía Costantino, Edited by Vyas Ponnuri
The legendary Lewis Hamilton achieved a new record at his home Grand Prix, winning his ninth race around the same track! But more importantly and emotionally, the 104th win for Lewis is his first since Dec. 5th, 2021 — a 31-month drought for the one of the most successful drivers of all time.
Although the longest time between two triumphs falls to the Italian Ricardo Patrese with 6 years, 6 months and 28 days, a record that can still be eclipsed by the mighty Fernando Alonso if he achieves another after the last one in Spain 2013, 11 years on now.
Hamilton’s victory in England was received superbly, the Briton genuinely thinking if he would win another race, and therefore looked for opportunities in other environments, opening up a move to Ferrari next year. This makes it a significant second consecutive triumph for the Mercedes team, which obviously seemed to get back into the top three together with McLaren and Red Bull.
The Woking-based team again missed a good opportunity to win, despite having the best cars on the track and good drivers who seemed to be above their team.
McLaren made two unacceptable strategic mistakes, the first by failing to comply with the previously announced double stop logic followed by their counterparts Mercedes, leaving Piastri with no option when the rain arrived.
The second was leaving Norris out for one more lap, before switching back to dry tyres, placing the soft compounds like Hamilton, to also lose second place to Verstappen.
After the affable and charismatic Bristol driver won in Miami, McLaren has done everything wrong. Since then, they’ve missed out on more than one win despite an increasingly better car in all possible conditions.
In the following six races, Norris has finished second thrice, at Imola,Canada and Spain, while his teammate Piastri finished second at Monaco. Zak Brown's leadership as the team's leader, most credited for marketing work, is in doubt. Ever since the departure of Ron Dennis, McLaren has never had a truly efficient management.
Meanwhile, Red Bull are losing ground in the constructors, as they count less and less on Sergio Perez. The Mexican was again out early in qualifying, confined to the rear of the grid for the race.
This time at Silverstone, he would find himself stranded in the gravel, totally out of focus, and asking to be pushed to the track to follow. A total ignorance of the regulations that stipulate that any external aid preventing him from continuing in the classification.
As Jenson Button did with Brawn GP in 2009, who triumphed in six of the first seven races of the season and then lived off his exploits for the rest of the season when the rest of the teams emulated Ross Brawn’s innovation with diffusers, Verstappen now enters the halfway stage of the season with 84 points over Norris, so he can simply manage his advantage to claim his fourth title in a row.
He has done excellently so far. Even though Verstappen has lost five races out of 12, each of them have been to a different competitor. It was Carlos Sainz and Ferrari in Australia, Lando Norris and McLaren in Miami, Charles Leclerc and Ferrari in Monaco, George Russell and Lewis Hamilton in Austria and Silverstone respectively.
Fittingly, the party in the UK kicked off with Sir Brian May waving the chequered flag with Lewis's triumph.
This race was arguably the best of the season. Drivers were subjected to difficult dry-wet-dry track conditions with changing dominance, mostly related to the performance of the different tyre compounds and the exact reading to make the changes.
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