With Ferrari
struggling at the moment to keep pace, and Lotus struggling to pay their
bills, the possibility of Red
Bull’s triple world champion Vettel winning by a comfortable margin
on Sunday, stretching his lead in the title race, and going on to enjoy a
lazy summer while Hamilton licked his wounds, was very real.
Instead Hamilton’s win cut the gap to Vettel to 48 points. It is still a
sizeable margin, of course, and he still lies fourth in the standings. But
if his tyre wear issues are indeed over then he has every chance of making
further inroads when the sport reconvenes at Spa after the summer factory
shutdown.
Mercedes have been for the most part unbeatable in qualifying this year, from
slow tracks such as Monaco to high-speed circuits such as Silverstone. It
was their race pace which was letting them down.
Hamilton is hopeful that he will now be competitive at every racetrack for the
rest of the year.
As he said himself: “If we can come here, the hottest race of the year, and
make the tyres last, we should be able to do it anywhere.”
The irony that it was largely Mercedes’ tyre issues – illustrated most
potently at Silverstone when Hamilton’s rear-left exploded spectacularly
while he was leading during the early part of the race – which were behind
the move to the new tyre structures introduced in Hungary was not lost on
anyone on Sunday.
Mercedes did not even get the chance to trial those new structures at
Silverstone two weeks ago, when their rivals were able to rack up thousands
of kilometres’ worth of data, as they were banned as a result of their
‘private’ Pirelli test in May.
Somehow, they managed to get to grips with the new tyres in the space of three
practice sessions, find the right balance and breathe new life into the
title race.
Hamilton still has some personal issues to which to attend this summer; his
split with his girlfriend Nicole Scherzinger still playing heavily on his
mind. But what an autumn we have in store now.