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Lewis Hamilton begins the race in which he could equal the all-time record for grand prix wins from pole position on Sunday, but that 91st win is a far cry from the near certainty it might have under other circumstances.
After a dramatic qualifying session at the Russian Grand Prix, in which the Mercedes driver nearly finished in 15th place after a combination of mistakes and bad luck, Hamilton has two main concerns before the race: tires on the ones you are and the fact that pole could be more of a disadvantage than an advantage.
First, track the position. Pole gives Hamilton a seven-meter lead over Max Verstappen’s Red Bull in second place. But the race from the grid to the first corner in Sochi is the longest on the calendar and the wake effect is huge.
In 2017, Hamilton’s teammate Valtteri Bottas used this from his third place on the grid to pass the two Ferraris in front of him and take a lead he will never lose on the way to his first victory.
Last year when Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc was on pole, ahead of Hamilton, Ferrari used team tactics to ensure Leclerc allowed his teammate Sebastian Vettel, who started third, to overtake him and lead him to the head, so they ran one and two ahead of Hamilton. That led to a big fight at Ferrari, But that is another story.
So, inevitably, Hamilton is concerned that at least one from Verstappen and Bottas will pass him on the straight after the start, which is third on the grid.
“It’s not a good place to start,” he said. “And this year our cars are more towed and there are more trailers than we’ve seen in other years. I really hope one of these two will fly in at some point.”
Hamilton has some defense against this because he is starting with the soft tires, which give the best grip off the line, while Verstappen and Bottas have the means.
Whether that’s enough to offset the effect of the trailer remains to be seen, but even if it is, Hamilton’s problems will be far from over, because the soft tire isn’t the best to start the race. It wears out too fast.
Even if he maintains the lead early on, Hamilton will have to fend off Bottas and Verstappen as much as he can, which is not easy with such a long fastball.
“I’m on the worst tire,” Hamilton said. “It’s a good tire to make a real start, but it has the most degradation, 10 times more than any other tire, I think it is, so it will be a struggle.”
“I don’t know if that puts me in two stops [strategy]. It’s unlikely because the pit lane is too slow, so I’ll have to take care of those tires as much as I can. “
If you can hold on, and Mercedes strategists can find a window of fresh air that you can step into after your pit stop, you might still be fine. But the team doesn’t sound so optimistic.
Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff said: “It’s not the optimal strategy because after a few laps the soft is clearly going to suffer and that means it compromises the whole race because you probably have to get into traffic and that’s not a big deal. situation”.
“But Lewis is the best forward on the field and I hope he can come back because he was the fastest driver on the track today.”
How did Hamilton get to this position?
The fastest driver than Hamilton certainly was: he took pole by more than 0.5 seconds and Bottas was 0.652 seconds adrift, and he admitted he didn’t know why. But the session was not easy for Hamilton. In fact, there were dramas from the beginning.
In the first knockout session, Hamilton ran wide on his first lap at turn two, the de facto first turn, and failed to meet guidelines on how to get back on track.
That meant he had to run a second round to move on to the next session, and led to an investigation by the stewards, although no further action was taken.
Then, in the second session, which defines the starting tires, Hamilton came out on the favorite media and set a spectacular first lap, 0.4 seconds faster than Bottas. However, that time was eliminated because he had drifted too far from the last corner and exceeded the limits of the track.
He wanted to do another lap right away and had a discussion with the team when he was called to the pits. Wolff said they had no other choice: He didn’t have enough fuel in the car to stay outside.
There was still plenty of time for another lap on medium tires at the end of the session, and Hamilton was three corners from the end of one that would have made him faster when Vettel crashed into turn four and raised the red flag.
Now, there was danger.
There were only two minutes and 15 seconds left in the session. In theory, there was still time to do a starting lap and start a fast lap before the checkered flag ended the session, but now Hamilton had another problem.
Time was tight, so there was going to be a rush to get out. Other cars lined up at the end of the pit lane and waited in line, their engines off. Hamilton couldn’t do that because the Mercedes engine cannot be restarted by the driver using electric power from the hybrid system, while those from the other three manufacturers can.
So Mercedes shipped it only when they knew there was little time left before the restart for it to sit in a queue with the engine idling without damaging it.
But that still meant waiting a couple of minutes, and that meant the engineers insisted that I switch to soft tires. Hamilton wanted the mediums again, but they rejected him because they were concerned that the tougher mediums would lose too much heat while he waited in line and that he could never warm them up again.
Even on the softs, he almost lost it in the first corner before picking it up again after going through the starting area. The final lap that followed was tense.
Knowing he was short on time, Hamilton asked midway how he was doing and was told he was 20 seconds behind.
He picked up the pace and pushed his way past Racing Point’s Sergio Pérez and McLaren’s Carlos Sainz before the last two corners. Then he was blocked by a Renault in the last corner.
As Hamilton stepped back to give himself some space, engineer Peter Bonnington came over on the radio, his voice urgent: “I need to go, I need to go, I need to go.” Hamilton knocked him down and crossed the line with a second to spare.
Can do it?
Hamilton spent the eight-minute break between sessions clearing his mind of stress and regaining his composure.
“I just have to calm down and find my center, you know, calm my heart and want to deliver in Q3,” he said.
“I was adamant. I had no choice. I had to deliver on those two laps. Valtteri had been doing very well all weekend. Nothing new in that regard, but I knew he had to do a perfect lap, especially the first. career”. to get the pole.
“Obviously pole position is not good here, it never has been. Still, going for pole is what we do.
“The first lap was really great. I thought it was going to be very difficult to improve, but I think I managed to improve just a little bit, I think, in the second lap.
“I’m very grateful to everyone for staying calm. And it could be much, much worse. I could be outside of the top 10, so I’m really grateful to be able to compete.”
Having dragged himself out of a hole in part of his own making on Saturday, Hamilton now somehow has to find a way to do it again in the race.
“I will focus on my race and try to run the fastest race I can,” Hamilton said.
“If these guys manage it, they’ll walk away, so I’m going to sit down and wonder if there’s a different kind of career I can do to keep my position.”
The album you won’t worry about, not in itself anyway. As he has said so many times, he does not like numbers, and as he noted Thursday: “It will happen at some point.
But he still wants victory, just for the sake of doing it, because that’s why he’s there and because it would be another giant step on the road to equaling another Schumacher record: seven World Championships.
