Hamilton sails to utterly dominant victory in Hungary

F1 Grand Prix, GP Hungary, Hungaroring

As soon as the lights went out, it was clear that Lewis Hamilton would be hard to beat. The Mercedes driver had a perfect start and nobody really came close anymore after that. Max Verstappen finished second with Bottas closely behind him in third.

The Hungarian Grand Prix was set to kick off on a damp track, but for Verstappen, it was only possible after tremendous work from his Red Bull mechanics. Verstappen had lost control of his car on the warm-up lap, crashed at Turn 12 and broke a suspension element. He did get on the grid where his mechanics avidly went to work to get his car sorted just in time for the race.

At the time of the start, the circuit was still damp, but not truly wet, and the only cars not on intermediates immediately went into the pitlane, enabling them to switch to dry weather tyres but requiring both to start from the pitlane, behind everybody else.

When the lights went out, Hamilton made a great start, as well as Stroll. Bottas had a very difficult getaway and dropped down into 6th, allowing Verstappen, Vettel and Leclerc to take position ahead of him. Perez also lost some places, dropping from 4th to 7th in the first lap.

After a single lap, Kvyat pitted to change to softs. Bottas changed to medium tyres one lap later and Leclerc to softs.

Meanwhile, Lewis Hamilton had already 8s of an advantage over Stroll after 2 and a half laps as Verstappen trailed Stroll very closely.

That third lap saw more than half the field enter the pits. Hamilton was first, and thanks to his big advantage, he returned to the track on mediums in 4th place. One lap later, the remaining intermediate tyre runners pitted as well, bringing Hamilton out in front again, 7.3s ahead of Verstappen. Magnussen and Grosjean ran third and fourth thanks to they early pitstop.

Stroll, Leclerc, Bottas, Vettel, Albon and Perez completed the top 10 as they started lap 4.

In the next laps, Bottas tried to recover some of his lost ground and managed to get past Leclerc, and then past both Haas cars by lap 17. At the same time, he steadily closed in to Stroll in third.

Albon made similar progress by making his way past both Ferraris. Vettel was easy, as the German outbraked himself and gave the place away as he may be way back to the track. Leclerc was a more difficult nut to crack, but on lap 18 he finally made it on the start-finish straight. That move immediately allowed Vettel to take a look at his team mate, and exactly one lap later, Vettel overtook his Ferrari team mate in a fair battle through Turns 1 to 4. Perez, Ricciardo and Sainz were all watching closely as they too followed within less than a second.

For Leclerc, the problem was certainly the tyres, as Leclerc was on softs with everybody else around him using the mediums. The monegask pitted the next lap and switched to hard Pirellis, hoping to go to the end of the race.

On lap 34, after Bottas failed to get past Stroll for numerous laps, he pitted, and went on to do a string of fastest laps on a used set of mediums. Stroll pitted two laps later, and found himself 7s down the road. After Hamilton and Bottas pitted ahead of him, Bottas was just 5.6s down on Verstappen, rather than the 15s ahead of his stop.

Bottas continued strongly until ending up behind Verstappen, then opting for another pitstop, this time switching to hard tyres on lap 51. This time again, he was flying, and right on his way to Verstappen. The Finn ended up in DRS range of the Dutchman in the penultimate lap, but failed to make it past the Red Bull, eventually finished a close third.

Hamilton meanwhile pitted from the lead 4 laps from the end to take on softs and do an easy fastest lap, underlining his and Mercedes's domination this weekend at the Hungaroring.

Sainz meanwhile managed to progress into 10th for the final point while Magnussen finished 9th, thanks to Haas's pitstop just ahead of the race start.