Thailand’s Alex Albon has little more than a week to convinced Red Bull Racing to keep him in his race-winning seat or potentially face the F1 wilderness.
Lewis Hamilton is equal with the iconic Michael Schumacher’s as Formula One’s most successful driver, but the question now is how far he’ll run with the baton.
Lewis Hamilton is the equal most successful F1 driver in history after matching Michael Schumacher’s record 91 victories at the Eifel Grand Prix.
Hamilton started second alongside teammate Valtteri Bottas but slipped past the Finn on lap 13 to take control of the race.
Bottas later retired from the grand prix with an engine issue, clearing the way for the Briton to cruise to the chequered flag.
Valtteri Bottas will try to shrink his championship deficit for the second weekend in a row when he starts ahead of teammate Lewis Hamilton for the Eifel Grand Prix at the Nurburgring on Sunday.
The fight for pole came down the final seconds of qualifying, with Hamilton taking top spot with his final lap only for Bottas to snatch the place back from the Briton in reply.
The Finn’s best time of 1 minute 25.525 seconds was a quarter-second quicker the Briton and more than two seconds quicker than the track record, which was previously set by Japan’s Takuma Sato in 2004.
Honda’s departure from top-level motorsport has left Red Bull Racing in need of an engine and Formula One in an existential crisis.
The 2020 Russian Grand Prix was no classic, but Lewis Hamilton’s inability to convert pole to victory was another illustration that the only team capable of beating Mercedes is Mercedes itself.
Valtteri Bottas has taken an easy win in Russia after polesitter Lewis Hamilton was slapped with two penalties on his way to the grid.
Championship leader Hamilton, who was targeting a record-equalling 91st Formula One victory in Sochi, made two practice starts outside the designated area in the pit lane before taking his place for the start of the race.
The stewards handed him two five-second penalties on safety grounds for the errors, effectively wiping him out of victory contention.
Lewis Hamilton will have a chance to equal Michael Schumacher’s record 91 Formula 1 victories from pole position at the Russian Grand Prix after crushing the opposition in qualifying.
Hamilton was more than half a second quicker than Red Bull Racing’s Max Verstappen in second and a dispiriting 0.652 seconds faster than teammate Valtteri Bottas, who will start third.
The Briton’s lap time of 1 minute 31.304 seconds was also a new track record for the Sochi Autodrom.
Last September Sebastian Vettel was locked in a volatile battle for supremacy inside a nascent Ferrari, but just 12 months later the four-time champion has stitched up a deal to flee the sinking scarlet ship for greener pastures.
Thailand’s Alex Albon at long last stepped onto a Formula One podium at Mugello, but will it be enough to keep him in his plum Red Bull Racing seat?
When Alex Albon opened his microphone after crossing the finish line third at the Tuscan Grand Prix he showed none of the exhilaration you might have expected from a racer at their first podium.
“Thank you, everyone; thanks for everything,” he radioed. “Thanks for sticking with me.”
Lewis Hamilton is one win short of equalling Michael Schumacher’s F1 victory record after triumphing at a chaotic Tuscan Grand Prix, while Alex Albon became Thailand’s first podium-getter with a strong third place.
F1 first visit to Mugello was high attrition, featuring two red flag interruptions and several multi-car crashes that left only 12 drivers still running when the chequered flag fell.
Hamilton wielded the disruption to his advantage. After losing pole to fast-starting teammate Valtteri Bottas on the first lap, he was able to seize back the lead at the first standing restart to break the Finn’s challenge.
Lewis Hamilton has snatched pole position for the Tuscan Grand Prix from teammate Valtteri Bottas after a yellow flag truncated the top-10 shootout at Mugello.
Hamilton had nosed ahead of Bottas after their first laps but had failed to improve with his final lap to seal the deal. However, Bottas was forced to abandon his own second lap when Renault’s Esteban Ocon spun his car through the gravel ahead of him at Poggio Secco, handing his teammate pole.
The Finn had clean swept all three practice sessions before qualifying, and Hamilton admitted to feeling on the back foot in the fight for pole.
Formula One rarely serves up races like the Italian Grand Prix, but Pierre Gasly’s win for AlphaTauri ahead of Carlos Sainz and Lance Stroll completely flipped the script.
Before this mad Monza race F1 had gone been 147 races — more than seven years — since anyone other than a Mercedes, Red Bull Racing or Ferrari driver topped the podium.
And in a season dominated by Mercedes, it took some plot twists to take Gasly to the top step.
Pierre Gasly is the first Frenchman to win a Formula 1 race in 24 years after claiming his maiden victory in a thriller at the Italian Grand Prix.
The 24-year-old AlphaTauri driver beat McLaren’s Carlos Sainz and Racing Point’s Lance Stroll to the flag after inheriting the lead from poleman Lewis Hamilton, who served a stop-go penalty for a tyre change while pit lane was closed.
But Hamilton wasn’t the only frontrunner to hit trouble, with a slew of problems creating a perfect storm to deliver the unpredictable podium.
Lewis Hamilton has defied rule changes in part aimed at slowing his Mercedes to storm to pole at the Italian Grand Prix with an all-time speed record.
Hamilton lapped the 5.793-kilometre Monza circuit in 1 minute 18.887 seconds. At an average speed of 264.362 kilometres per hour, it set the record for fastest lap in Formula 1 history.
It was enough to pip teammate Valtteri Bottas by a slender 0.069s in a Mercedes front-row lockout, though the Finn is optimistic he has better race pace than Hamilton in his mission to slice into his 50-point championship deficit on Sunday.
Lewis Hamilton won his fifth race of the season to extend his championship lead to nearly two clear race victories at the Belgian Grand Prix, but the biggest story of this staid Sunday came at the back of the field and well out of the points.
Ferrari, motorsport’s most famous and best-funded team, lumbered home to its worst result in a decade in a hellish weekend at Spa-Francorchamps.
Sebastian Vettel and Charles Leclerc crawled to 13th and 14th, beaten by Alfa Romeo’s Kimi Raikkonen and only five seconds ahead of Williams rookie Nicholas Latifi in its lowest meritorious double finish since 2010.
Lewis Hamilton is almost two clear wins atop the F1 championship standiings after breezing to a comfortable victory at the Belgian Grand Prix.
Hamilton was peerless at Spa-Francorchamps, leading every lap of the race from pole to beat teammate Valtteri Bottas by almost nine seconds.
The win was Hamilton’s 89th, just two shy of Michael Schumacher’s record 91 victories.
Lewis Hamilton has broken the track record at Spa-Francorchamps to beat Mercedes teammate Valtteri Bottas to pole position for the Belgian Grand Prix.
The world championship leader was untouchable in the top-10 shootout, setting two laps quick enough for pole to keep Bottas at bay by a whopping half-second.
“Very, very clean session,” he said. “Every lap was just getting better and better.”