Valtteri Bottas won a dramatic Charles Leclerc Formula 1 Austrian Grand Prix after Lewis Hamilton’s penalty for contact with Alex Albon knocked him down from second to fourth.
Bottas crossed the line as the winner of a wear race 0.6 seconds ahead of his teammate, but Hamilton was immediately demoted, taking McLaren’s Lando Norris to the first podium of the F1 race in third place. .
Hamilton’s incident with Albon occurred after the end of the third period of the safety car race and after Mercedes had to intervene with its drivers due to critical reliability warnings.
Initially, Bottas easily kept the lead out of the line and shot himself to a two-second lead at the end of the opening tour, as Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, the sole starter in the top 10 on medium tires, absorbed the Norris pressure after several cars, including Norris, Hamilton and Leclerc, crossed the second lap at the exit of Turn 1.
Bottas began to extend his lead as the race calmed down, warned by his team to take care of his car on the third lap, while Verstappen tracked him down.
But any hope Red Bull had of his alternative strategy to help Verstappen to a third consecutive victory on the team’s home court was crushed when the Dutchman suddenly lost power as he approached Turn 1 on lap 11 of 71. He returned to the pits trying to reset the problem, a possible electrical problem, but was forced to retreat.
That left Hamilton chasing Bottas, as the world champion had demoted Norris previously, and then Albon using DRS to rush to turn 4 on lap nine, and he quickly began to eat the lead lead.
As the first period progressed, Hamilton had narrowed the gap with Bottas, but the soft tire race suddenly ended when the safety car was called after Kevin Magnussen ran away with an apparent brake problem when Esteban Ocon was passing him. . Lap 3.
Mercedes managed to turn her two cars around, both on hard tires, without wasting time on either one, and when the race resumed, Bottas started again.
However, Hamilton soon put Bottas under severe pressure and called the team to verify that he would be allowed to choose his own engine mode, as Mercedes soon planned to reject the power units in both cars.
But as the leaders got closer and closer, Mercedes moved to warn them about a possible gearbox sensor problem that threatened the continued involvement of both cars. Bottas and Hamilton’s career engineers warned of their charges of staying away from the sidewalk before Mercedes chief strategist James Vowles stepped in to tell them the problem was “critical.”
When the leaders adapted their driving styles, Hamilton began to withdraw from Bottas when the race was suddenly suspended again when George Russell retired from P13 with a loss of fuel pressure in his Williams.
Both Mercedes stayed outside on their hard tires, while Albon faced off from the third for a set of softs, and joined in the fourth.
Almost immediately after the race restarted, it was suspended again when Kimi Raikkonen, who had just stopped for new softs, lost her right front wheel running down the penultimate corner.
Just before the safety car returned, Albon had managed to overtake Sergio Perez of Racing Point at the exit of Turn 3 after the Mexican locked up and ran deep.
When the safety car last took off, Bottas cleared again, and on the next lap Albon, who had returned the position to Perez, only to resume third place while the race was still neutralized, attacked Hamilton around the curve. 4. Red Bull seemed to be ahead on the outside line, but the contact between Hamilton’s left forward and Albon’s right rear caused Albon to spin on the gravel, echoing the contact between the pair at the Brazilian GP in last year.
When Bottas ran to the flag in what was an 11-lap final sprint, Hamilton received a five-second addition. That meant Leclerc, who had been leading a discreet race before the safety cars changed the action, finished second as he had been stopped by new means during the Russell safety car.
He dropped Perez from third place on the road with a late move in turn 3 five laps to run and was close enough to Hamilton to advance to second place after the flag.
Norris claimed last place on the podium after surviving a late fight with teammate Carlos Sainz and then beating Perez, who had tried to make a long mediums race run earlier in the race, at Turn 3. But Norris needed to close the gap with Hamilton quickly and set the fastest lap of the race on the last tour to finish third by 0.1 seconds once the world champion’s penalty was applied.
Sainz finished fifth with Perez sixth after receiving his own five-second penalty for speeding in the pitlane.
Pierre Gasly was seventh before Ocon’s return for Renault, and Antonio Giovinazzi ninth for Alfa Romeo.
Sebastian Vettel took tenth place despite a turn when he miscalculated his braking as he ran behind Sainz’s McLaren as he entered Turn 3 shortly before half the distance.
Nicholas Latifi finished his F1 debut as the final racer on the track at P11, with Albon a late retirement along with a host of other non-finalists who suffered from various mechanical problems, except Daniil Kvyat, who retired late with a rear tire. Left broken when he ran into Turn 1 with two laps to go.
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