True. Though with Mercedes straight line speed and the difficulty in following you never know what might have happened, and we were robbed of a decent battle.
We were definitely robbed of an interesting race, I’ll give you that 
I think the place to try to squeeze Max should have been a couple of hundred meters before the turn. After that, leaving room for Max was the decent thing to do. Exiting the turn Bottas definitely didn’t leave room for Ricciardo, and he paid the price for that. But I don’t think that was intentional, just bad luck.
There was sooo many dumb things/penalties this weekend that i wish hadn’t happened. But holy shit, it made for a great, exciting, and interesting race!
I’m having a bit of trouble figuring out why teams don’t just replace their engine every weekend, if you can just use the extra power to drive past everyone. Why follow the rules if you get an advantage from breaking them?
The penalty against Tsunoda seemed a bit harsh, too. He was along side Stroll, who then ran him halfway off the track at the apex.
Not every track offers easy overtaking on the straight. And the Merc gets an extra boost as their engine seems to have a fault which causes it to lose horsepower more quickly than it should.
Expense. Which matters now in a cost cap environment.
Okay, but what happens to a team that exceeds the cost cap? My point is that if a team breaks the rules, serves the penalty, and still comes out ahead, they’ll do it every time. Mercedes could have built an engine which didn’t need to be replaced as often, but with a little less power. They didn’t do that, and they’re leading the championship.
Very interesting weekend indeed for HAM, huh? I know he has his haters, but I find it hard to take anything away from that guy. That was pretty amazing.
It certainly looked like Verstappen forced him off the track, the stewards must have seen something we didn’t. I wouldn’t call myself a Hamilton fan, but I’m certainly not a Verstappen fan.
A little gutted for the McLaren boys; at least Norris was able to fight his way back up a bit (thank you, safety car). Ricciardo seemed to be kind of stuck where he was and points seemed iffy, but having to retire at all sucks.
I’ve never really gotten in to the ‘story and drama’ part of sports, which is why I’ve never been much of a sports fan. But I’m starting to think there’s more glorious sports moments in a single weekend of F1 than in a week or more of (American) football or baseball, possibly excluding playoffs.
Interesting…
Verstappen should have sent Lewis into the barriers. From Silverstone, we know it would only be a 10 second penalty.
But seriously, Hamilton had a great weekend.
Kimi also had a decent result starting from pit lane.
Alpine and Alphatauri tied in the Constructors standing should provide some mid pack entertainment in the last three races.
Exceptional performance from Hamilton. 20th to 5th in a third race distance was pretty special. Then from 10th to a race win was unprecedented at Interlagos. To be docked 25 race places over a weekend and still win highlights this as one of his best performances.
Verstappen was very, very fortunate not to be properly investigated for his move because on the evidence I’ve seen it seems like a slam-dunk penalty (and all the experts I’ve heard seem to be of the same mind). That combined with the rather absolutist approach to an additional 0.2mm gap on the DRS flap and an allowance to let RB keep changing their rear wing in parc ferme, no wonder Merc are getting something of a persecution complex.
Hard to know quite where the balance of power lies over the last three races but really good to have a proper title battle.
It is simply unbelievable that Verstappen didn’t get penalized for driving Hamilton off the track in Brazil. It should be obvious at this point that he is simply driving into him every time he is about to get overtaken. This one was even more obvious than Rosberg’s ham-fisted attempt to force Hamilton off in Austria.
The Red Bull guy who claimed on the radio that “it’s all about letting them race” is a fucking idiot. Verstappen wasn’t even trying to race.
I just saw the on-board from Verstappen. He didn’t ease off the steering wheel during that corner to force Hamilton off. But as I saw someone comment, he also had to know that going in to the corner at that speed, he wasn’t going to make it and that’s the path the car would take.
Mercedes has requested a review of the incident considering new evidence. I wouldn’t hate to see Max get whatever penalty is appropriate. 5 places in the next race?
And this is just an amateur throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks, but I don’t think there’s any way Max could have pulled off the race that Lewis did on Sunday. I tried to look up his win from farthest back on the grid, but didn’t have any luck.
I think he absolutely knew what he was doing, he made very little effort to hit the apex and take the standard racing line.
Good point, but without a new engine Lewis himself might not have been able to pull off the race that Lewis did on Sunday. On the other hand, turn 4 was where a few drivers had issues with track limits during qualifying, so it’s not surprising staying on track would be an issue in the heat of the battle.
This article says it was a german GP, from 14th, but not which year.
[Quote] This is only the fifth time Hamilton has won after started behind the front two rows of the grid. It’s the second-lowest starting position Hamilton has won a race from: he previously took victory in the German Grand Prix from 14th on the grid.
He made a larger greater gain in positions during Saturday’s sprint qualifying race, rising 15 places from 20th to fifth. But that falls short of his personal best, a 19-place climb to third in the 2014 Hungarian Grand Prix, back when F1 still had 22-car fields.[/quote]
Oh thank you! I meant Verstappens win from farthest back on the grid, though.
Oops! Sorry. With some digging around, it seems Max has a couple wins from 4th, including his first in Spain 2016 when the mercs took each other out.
Well I think that’s my favorite P1-P10 staring grid this season. 2 AlphaTauri, 2 Alpines and an Aston Martin.