How Lewis Hamilton's skills and a Ferrari mistake helped Mercedes win the Hungarian GP



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A after the early shutdown of Bottas (to cover that of Raikkonen) and Hamilton's stoppage on lap 25, the next leg of Vettel's run was on the gap with Bottas. The pace of the German did not seem strong enough to match or extend a sufficient margin to Hamilton, who now had a lot of cooler rubber, but that was never probable at this stage of the race.

Vettel desperately need to jump Bottas after his own stop to give himself an outdoor chance of victory and, of course, the best chance to take the second. Ferrari had the fastest package after all and Hamilton would be worn rubber.

Depite Bottas being on much newer tires, he did not seem to have the pace to jump Vettel. Halfway through, on lap 35, he was almost 25 seconds behind Vettel. A pit stop costs about 21 seconds. Vettel's speed was good at the approach of his stop. Bottas did not have enough.

But at that point, Vettel was getting closer to the backmarkers and was losing a few seconds trading them. Carlos Sainz has spent a little too many blue flags without letting the leader pbad. Vettel was unhappy and knew that he was losing decisive seconds.

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