Valtteri Bottas Wins Russian GP After Lewis Hamilton's Penalties

From Road & Track

It has been clear for a few years that 2020 would be the season where the combination of Mercedes dominance and personal dominance would make 2020 the season that Lewis Hamilton tied Michael Schumacher's most important career records, 91 wins and seven championships. With every race, those records seem to be coming up quickly; He retains a 44 point lead on teammate Valtteri Bottas in the hunt for his seventh World Driver's Championship, and his next win will mark his 91st.

With the career pole record already well in hand (and his hundredth career pole to follow soon), today was to be the second of his three inevitable coronations. He started from the front of the field, where he has started 96 of his 260 grands prix, he got away from the start with the lead, and he avoided the inevitable chaos at the back of the field on the opening lap that led to an early safety car. But win 91 did not come today.

Instead, he was handed two separate time penalties for unsanctioned practice starts before the race, five seconds each.

Safety car timing from two separate incidents on lap 1 meant that he was unable to build any significant lead before the stop, pushing him down to mid-field after the penalty. He made quick work of the Renaults and Racing Points ahead of him, but, as he fought through traffic, teammate Valtteri Bottas built up his lead. Hamilton would not catch Bottas or Red Bull's Max Verstappen, and his day would end in a disappointing third as his Mercedes-AMG teammate won for the second time this year.

Hamilton expressed his displeasure with the penalties post-race, noting that the practice starts outside of the practice zone were a common practice for him throughout the season and that he asked his team for approval before making the starts. Nonetheless, the series issued their ruling, and this steward's decision combines with other decisions over the past year to leave him with ten penalty points in a 12 month period, just two away from the mark that leads to a one-race suspension with four races before that risk significantly decreases.

Behind the leaders, the race was largely clean, with the only in-race incidents coming on the first lap. The first came when Carlos Sainz Jr. clipped the outside wall with his left-front tire while returning from an off-track excursion, the second came when a collision between Charles Leclerc and Lance Stroll left Stroll's Racing Point entry in the wall a few corners later. Those would be the race's only retirements.

Stroll's outgoing Racing Point teammate, Sergio Perez, would go on to finish fourth, ahead of a jumble of Leclerc, both Renaults, and both AlphaTauri entries. Alex Albon would be the final point-scoring entry in the second Red Bull, meaning that Sebastian Vettel would again log another race with Ferrari without scoring any points. Both Vettel and Ferrari will be happy to see his nightmarish season end in a few months, though restricted upgrade rules make a path for immediate improvement difficult for Ferrari in 2021.

Formula 1 takes a week off before returning at the Nurburgring Grand Prix circuit on October 11th, their first round at the track since 2013. Inexplicably, this round is to be called the Eifel Grand Prix, even though no other German Grand Prix is currently scheduled in the near future.

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