Mercedes’ Hamilton untouchable in dominant win at Barcelona; P3 Bottas’ poor start costs him as Verstappen seizes second place for Red Bull

In a largely procedural Spanish Grand Prix on Sunday at the hot and dry Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, Mercedes ace Lewis Hamilton streaked away from his pole position when the lights went out to start the race and never faced a real challenge for the entirety of the 66-lap contest. When the checkers waved Hamilton stomped the next closest pursuer, Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, by a whopping 24-seconds and the only real suspense in the race was whether it might possibly rain and shake things up via forcing a scramble for wet weather tires. But the dark clouds remained in the distance closer to the mountains and the sun continued to shine on Hamilton here, as he easily wrapped up his fourth consecutive win at the Spanish GP and expanded his lead over Verstappen in the drivers’ standings to a 37 point bulge.

While the superb Dutch Red Bull pilot was never able to offer a challenge to the front running Silver Arrow, Max was able to gobble up Hamtilon’s teammate Veltteri Bottas to grab P2 from the Finn at the start of the race. In fact, Bottas had such a poor getaway that he also lost a position to Racing Point’s Lance Stroll and he quickly fell to P4. While Bottas was able to claw that spot back from the young Canadian it proved to be a crucial bit of lost momentum and he spent the rest pf the race in recovery mode. Even after taking a gamble by switching off of Medium Pirellis onto the ostensibly faster Softs for his second stop on Lap 48 to try and close the gap to the Red Bull, Bottas was unable to mount a sustained attack on Verstappen, who easily maintained a large gap to come home P2, albeit miles behind Hamilton. Bottas did score the extra point for the fastest lap of the race yet after another tire switch back to Mediums two laps from the finish but it was cold comfort, as he saw his own deficit to second place Verstappen grow to 6 in the Drivers’ points and 43 to the leading Hamilton.

Pics courtesy GrandPrix247.com

The mini-Mercedes of Racing Point had another very good day with the returning Sergio Perez finishing P4 and Stroll P5 on the track but the two switching spots after Perez was penalized 5-seconds after a dubious stewards’ call dinged the Mexican for ignoring blue flags. McLaren’s Carlos Sainz got his best ever finish at his home GP with P6 while teammate Lando Norris,w ho seemingly had to fight tooth and nail for every position on the day, also finished in the points at P10. Ferrari’s beleaguered Sebastian Vettel had something of a mild personal victory after converting a one-stopper and a final stint on some very old Soft tires into a P7 result. But even when there is some sort of optimistic result for the fabled Scuderia something else seems to take the bloom off it in 2020. In this case, it was a mysterious electrical problem that cut Charles Leclerc’s motor while he was mid-dice with Norris on Lap 37. The unlucky Monegasque was forced to retire shortly thereafter. Also unlucky was Verstappen’s teammate Alexander Albon, who got stuck mired in traffic and on very slow Hard tires mid-race after a highly questionable strategic decision by the Red Bull brain trust. Albon gamely fought with a bevy of midfield runners to try and get further up the order but could only manage a P8 finish. The man who Albon replaced at Red Bull last year, AlphaTauri’s Pierre Gasly, was able to finish in the points after his solid qualifying effort by coming home P9.

Top 10 finishers of the Spanish GP:

Complete race result available via Formula1.com.

The drivers get anther little breather as the next race is in a fortnight’s time at the legendary Spa-Francorchamps circuit in Belgium. Hope to see you then to find out if anyone can possibly slow down the Hamilton-Mercedes juggernaut — though I wouldn’t bet on it!