As team chief Toto Wolff said on Sunday night: “With Lewis [Hamilton], we’ve had the fastest car. He was 50 seconds behind, and he caught them at the end, in a few moments he was the quickest. , and that shows the potential that the car has.”
Wolff’s tone is optimistic enough to suggest what might have been possible if the seven-time world champion hadn’t struggled at Turn 4 on lap one when he collided with Kevin Magnussen.
Having finished the race the same 50 seconds behind at the checkered flag as he had on the first lap, is there any reason to think that Hamilton could have won the race?
Let’s analyze the figures
The incident between the Briton and Magnussen caused a puncture in the Mercedes, which made him fall to the back of the grid, entering the pits at the end of the lap that started the Spanish event.
He rejoined in 19th position, some 38.6 seconds behind Nicholas Latifi, who was one place ahead, and a whopping 53.9 seconds behind the race leader, Monegasque Charles Leclerc, when he crossed the finish line in second turn.
After ditching Pirelli’s medium compound and riding a used soft (with Leclerc the only one with a fresh game), Hamilton wasn’t the quickest at the start. In fact, the intention, as was shown, was to run as much as possible with that compound, which further removed him from the head of the race.
The Englishman was thus more than a minute behind at the end of lap eight, and when he made his second pit stop on lap 22, the deficit increased to one minute and 7 seconds over the Monegasque’s Ferrari.
After going to the media, the distance between Hamilton and Leclerc remained around one minute and 16 seconds, until the Maranello car said enough due to a loss of power from its engine, which caused the change in the lead.
When his Brackley team mate George Russell took the lead on lap 27, the seven-time world champion was a minute and 2 seconds back, and it was at that stage that, as the leaders battled, he was able to cut the gap.
With a fresher midfield game, as he had stopped nine laps before the young Englishman and Verstappen, and another five before Sergio Pérez, the trio’s gap began to drop at a rate of one second per lap.
By lap 29, he was already under a minute, and in the next few laps Lewis Hamilton was the fastest on the track. When Pérez got ahead of Russell on lap 31, the seven-time champion was already 56.2 seconds behind, and in the following laps he improved: 54.3 (seconds), 52.8s, 51.4s, 50.5s, 49s.
As the lead in the race shuffled due to pit stops, Hamilton maintained a solid pace to pit for the third and final time on Lap 48, when he was just 31.2sec off the lead in qualifying.
The Briton put on softs a bit earlier than his Mercedes teammate and Perez, and completed his first lap out of the pitlane 51.6 seconds behind the driver leading the race, Max Verstappen, who was on medium tyres.
Hamilton made good use of his tires thereafter to drastically reduce the gap, which was reduced at this pace: 50.2 (seconds), 47.8s, 46.8s, 45.4s, 43.8s, 42.0s, 40.8s. That before he was behind Carlos Sainz, fighting for fourth position.
He soon found his way past the Spaniard from Ferrari on lap 60, and set out to push on, narrowing the gap to 39.3sec from eventual winner Max Verstappen by the end of lap 62.
However, the alarms went off on the Mercedes wall due to an increase in engine temperature due to a water leak, and that forced the Englishman to loosen up to make sure he reached the finish line.
After slowing down by around two seconds a lap, the Dutchman’s lead grew to 54.5 seconds , just half a second more than where he was at the end of lap two.
The figures, especially that of Hamilton, 31 seconds behind Verstappen in the last stint, suggest that he would have been in contention with Red Bull if things had developed without the touch of the start with Kevin Magnussen.
But what is always difficult to estimate is how the pace would have changed if the Englishman were racing with the leaders instead of going in clean air, when he doesn’t care about the rest of the rivals and only focuses on extending the life of the tyres.
However, he would have been in contention for victory before the unexpected problem with the water leak, which would have ended all hopes in a hypothetical battle against Max Verstappen.
An alternative strategy could also have been chosen with George Russell in order to provide Hamilton with a possible victory, blocking the way for the Red Bull of the Dutchman and Checo Pérez.
It’s all theory, but there’s reason to believe the podium was very close to the seven-time world champion without the Turn 4 crash, as the pace was there. For a man who has had a rough ride since losing the title at the 2021 Abu Dhabi GP, it was a ray of hope he has been chasing for a long time.
“A race like that is like a victory,” said the Briton. “In fact, it often feels better than a win when you’ve come so far back and been through so much.”
