Coming into P1 on Friday speculation was that Lewis Hamilton would receive a 5-place grid penalty for Sunday’s race for an engine penalty and that was confirmed a few minutes into the practice session and Mercedes battle, and more importantly Hamilton’s battle for the championship just got a little harder.
After Friday’s practice and qualifying sessions were complete it was Hamilton, with that new engine, who was fastest and took pole position for Saturdays Sprint Race. If Lewis could go into the Sprint Race and hold onto P1 throughout then the damage from his 5-place engine penalty would take him to 6th to start tomorrow’s race. However, the eagle eye that is Max Verstappen noticed something when he was behind Lewis’ Mercedes and thought the gap in Hamilton’s DRS was larger than it should be. Max even went up to Hamiltons car on the grid to take a look for himself just to make sure his measurements checked out and received a $50,000 dollar fine for touching another drivers car (or Euro idk what currency he was fined in).
After a few hours of deliberation the stewards decided that Hamiltons DRS gap was off by a couple millimeters and had to start the Sprint race from 20th position. This gave Verstappen pole position for the Sprint and Valterri Bottas finishing off the front row. With 19 points seperating Verstappen and Hamilton and only 4 races remaining this penalty looms very large for the drivers championship.
When lights went out for the Sprint race it was Mercedes’ Valterri Bottas stepping up for the team and beat Verstappen clean off the line to take the lead and never looked back the entire race. With the Sprint race victory Bottas will start tomorrow’s Grand Prix in pole position followed by Verstappen who finished 2nd, Carlos Sainz, Sergio Perez, and Lando Norris.
However, it was not Norris who finished the Sprint in 5th position. Lewis Hamilton, who we previously discussed how he started in 20th from the back) ended up finishing the 24 lap Sprint race in P5 as he made up 15 positions. After making up 4 positions on the start and making quick work of both Haas cars and Williams drivers before the first turn, Sir Lewis Hamilton put on a show for the people as he was passing driver after driver in the DRS zone and making it look easy. Showing everyone why he is a 7-time World CHampion, Hamilton knew his record breaking 8th title lay in the balance and he had to do everything he could to make his way through the pther drivers to start tomorrow’s Grand Prix as high up the grid as possible. When it was all said and done the Qualifying disqualification only cost Hamilton 4 spots in tomorrow’s race and that’s assuming he would have won today’s Sprint race.
Another driver who made the most of the Sprint was Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz. Starting in P5 Sainz had a great jump at lights out and made his way around Sergio Perez and then squeezed out Verstappen to get to P2 before he was re-passed shortly after by Verstappen and finished the race P3 almost 19 seconds behind the race leaders. More impressive was how he was able to hold off Perez the entire race on used soft tires and Perex on Mediums. Sergio was within striking distance the majority of the race but could not get by the Ferrari and not able to claim the championship point that came with 3rd.
Tomorrow’s Sao Paulo GP starts at 12:00 PM EST and with Hamilton starting in the midfield it should call for another exciting race.