Punctures and pitstops
The twists in the 2020 British GP’s tale began on lap 50, just two from the end, when Valtteri Bottas suffered a catastrophic left-front Pirelli tyre failure as he passed the pits. The Finn was forced into limp mode for a whole lap that stripped him of a comfortable second place. Even worse, he then lacked the time to make a meaningful comeback once he’d pitted, finishing an agonising and pointless 11th, hot on the heels of Sebastian Vettel’s lacklustre Ferrari.
Max Verstappen thus took a step up the podium, but at the same time his team played him out of the victory. As Bottas struggled in his crippled Mercedes, Red Bull stuck to its ploy of pitting Verstappen for fresh tyres in a bid to claim the fastest lap. Which he managed – at the cost of winning the race.
Hindsight, as ever, is a wonderful thing, but still this seemed an odd call from the usually sharp Red Bull pit wall. The Bottas tyre failure had confirmed that vocal concerns from both Mercedes drivers over the state of their rubber were all too real. The resumption of action on lap 19, after a safety car following Daniil Kvyat’s crash, forced the majority to stretch the hard-compound tyres to 33 laps at full race pace. Whatever the cause, be it over-use or debris, Red Bull knew there was every chance Hamilton would suffer the same fate as his team-mate, and indeed his engineer Peter Bonnington had warned him to back off, in the interests of simply bringing the car home. Red Bull boss Christian Horner defended the decision to pit by pointing out Verstappen’s own rubber wasn’t in the best shape either – but in the circumstances, throwing the dice and leaving him out there in the hope of a second gift seemed the more characteristic call from a team usually known for its creative strategic aggression.
Likewise, Mercedes also dropped the ball, almost calamitously, by not calling Hamilton in for fresh tyres on the last lap in the wake of Verstappen’s stop. There was now plenty of time in hand, the team knew Hamilton’s front-left was also highly suspect, and yet conversely they chose to leave him out. So both Red Bull and Mercedes made the wrong calls in the heat of the moment – one to pit, the other not to – as Hamilton’s left front failed on his way down to Brooklands on that final lap. This remains, despite its technology, a very human sport.
Hamilton did a great job to balance the right amount of speed without losing the tyre’s carcass completely as Bonnington counted down the reducing gap to Verstappen, and he hobbled across the line just 5.8sec to the good. That he even managed to complete the full warm-down lap was, in a way, an odd testament to the Pirelli’s fortitude, even in failure.
The upshot was a podium trio made up of a deeply relieved Hamilton, a surprisingly sanguine Verstappen who had still gained more from this race than he’d expected, and a lowkey Charles Leclerc who had made the best of his Ferrari, but knew how lucky he’d been to finish third. As for Bottas, he could only contemplate a suddenly yawning 30-point deficit to his team-mate in their personal race for the world title. In a season condensed by the coronavirus, is the championship already over, after just four races? It might have swung on these tyre failures and their contrasting outcomes.