Hamilton goes lights-to-flag for dominant F1 Spanish GP win
Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton stormed to a dominate victory at the Spanish Grand Prix to further strengthen his quest for a seventh Formula 1 world championship.
Hamilton converted pole position into the win by leading every tour of the 66-lap race as he registered his fourth victory in a row in Spain. A fourth win of the season means Hamilton has now increased his lead in the championship standings to 37 points over Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, who finished second, some 24s behind.
Another peerless performance saw Hamilton claim his 88th career victory, moving him just three wins shy of Michael Schumacher’s all-time record of 91 grand prix victories.
It also marked Hamilton's 156th podium finish, a new F1 record, beating Schumacher's previous benchmark of 155 rostrum appearances.
Verstappen kept the sister Mercedes of Valtteri Bottas behind him, with the Finn left to rue a poor start which forced him into a recovery effort to seal the final spot on the podium, a result that sees him drop further adrift of Hamilton in the 2020 title fight.
Bottas slipped behind Verstappen and both Racing Point drivers at Turn 1, and was momentarily shuffled back to fifth, before he was able to get ahead of Sergio Perez by holding the gripper outside line at Turn 3 to take fifth on the run to the next corner.
Lance Stroll kept Bottas at bay until Lap 5 when the Mercedes driver surged past on the run to Turn 1 to move into third.
Despite running on Soft tyres for his second of three stints, Bottas was unable to mount a challenge to the second-placed Medium-shod Verstappen, who secured his fifth consecutive podium of the season.
Hamilton lapped everyone up to his teammate in third as Perez finished a distant fourth on the road ahead of Racing Point teammate Stroll, but dropped one place to fifth after he received a five-second time penalty for ignoring blue flags.
That promoted Stroll into fourth - matching his best result of the season, ahead of McLaren’s Carlos Sainz and the one-stopping Sebastian Vettel, who rose from 11th on the grid to seal Ferrari’s only points of the day in seventh.
The four-time world champion beat Alex Albon’s Red Bull to eighth, while Pierre Gasly and Lando Norris completed the points-scoring positions in P9 and P10 for AlphaTauri and McLaren respectively.
Charles Leclerc was the only retirement after his Ferrari engine switched off mid-corner and forced him into a spin on Lap 38, before he peeled into the pitlane two laps later with Ferrari beginning its investigation into an electrical problem.
