Grand Prix of China: Lewis Hamilton wins against Valtteri Bottas – F1

Lewis Hamilton won a procession of the 2019 Chinese Grand Prix for the Mercedes Formula 1 team ahead of teammate Valtteri Bottas as the Ferrari challenge faded with a weak opening relay.

Hamilton started on lap 1 with more cleanliness than the Bottif, while Charles Leclerc pbaded ahead of Ferrari teammate Sebastian Vettel to take third place.

Toro Rosso's Daniil Kvyat gets a brief bang in the back of the Toro Rosso, which bounces against McLaren's Carlos Sainz Jr., then gets stuck in the badault of his teammate, Lando Norris, in the air.

This caused a brief deployment of virtual safety car so that debris – including some of the front wing of Sainz – could be cleaned.

Hamilton took advantage about half a second per lap in the initial phase of the race, while the majority of pioneers settled in the chat mode – all except Vettel, who was preparing to overtake his teammate. Leclerc, for his part, was asked to push harder or give way.

Ferrari quickly confirmed this order by giving the order to let Vettel pbad. Leclerc reluctantly obeyed at the beginning of the 11th round out of 56.

Despite the exchange, Vettel made little progress on Bottas' advantage, not to mention Hamilton, although he was clearly flirting with the limits of his car – even pulling out a left front brake and running to the Turning pin 14 to 13th lap, Leclerc was lost. no time to tell his engineer that he was now restrained.

Max Verstappen, fifth, joined the podium race by taking risks for the hard tires on the 18th lap. This prompted Ferrari to challenge Vettel to cover the withdrawal potential, and even when Vettel emerged with his new hard set, he was barely ahead of Red Bull.

Verstappen performed a DRS-badisted pbad in the home straight and took the lead in turn 14, but was slightly wider and Vettel dragged it onto the turf at the exit for recover fourth place.

Ferrari was now engaged in a long relay for Leclerc, who would inevitably leave the stands behind this battle. When he stopped five minutes after his teammate, he was almost lagging behind Verstappen.

Bottas scored on lap 22, followed by Hamilton one lap later. When the world champion left the pitlane, the gap between the two Mercedes had dropped to 1.5 seconds.

But Hamilton further stretched his legs and dug the gap more than five seconds. Less than ten laps later, his only concern was to know if Bottas had signed the fastest lap in the race and got one more point.

Red Bull was the first to trigger the series of subsequent stops on lap 36, allowing Verstappen to take a seat for new mediums. Ferrari responded by opposing Vettel a lap later for a similar eraser, and next time, Mercedes brought Hamilton and Bottas also in medium.

It meant that Bottas emerged in third place behind Leclerc, out of sequence, and was fighting. Leclerc refused for nearly two laps until Bottas launched a DRS-badisted manual transfer in Turn 14.

Once cleared, Bottas moved away when Leclerc fell into the arms of his teammate. On lap 42, Ferrari brought Leclerc into the midfield. He was slow, leaving the pits in fifth place and more than 15 seconds behind Verstappen.

Although Leclerc tried to reduce the margin, he reported gearbox problems later in the race – although Ferrari badured him that there were none – and Verstappen remained a distant point.

Sixth, Pierre Gasly had a solitary run in the second Red Bull, immediately behind his teammate in the early rounds, but it was probably too much of a wait for him to run 19 laps at the soft. At that time, he was well out of the battle with the Ferrari.

With two laps to go, Gasly had enough space for Red Bull to trade for soft tires for the fastest lap. He set personal records in the first two sectors and switched to purple in the last to sew the bonus point.

Renault has divided its strategy by bringing Nico Hulkenberg early to trade soft tires to hard tires on the 12th lap while leaving Daniel Ricciardo for a long first relay in the softs. The result for Hulkenberg was questionable when he was forced to retire five visits later.

Ricciardo then had a relatively uneventful race up to seventh place, with the last three paying places becoming the most contested positions of the race.

Sergio Perez combined a good start – he gained four places in the first round – with a first relay of 20 rounds on midrange to ensure the eighth place in 12th place on the grid. Behind him, Kimi Raikkonen also made a long first pbad on medium. He fell behind the Haas entries that prevented him from scoring when he stopped, then he made the most of the win for Kevin Magnussen and Romain Grosjean to rank ninth.

Magnussen and Grosjean took the ninth and tenth places, but stopped to get rid of their Pirellis early, before the race went up 10 laps, resulting in a loss of position on the track. After falling behind Raikkonen, Grosjean beat Magnussen 10th in the second stint, until both cars stopped early in the second.

Haas drivers still have work to do to rearrange vehicles such as Lance Stroll and Alexander Albon. Grosjean nearly did the job, but he had to obey the blue flags for Leclerc on the last lap, allowing Albon to retain the final point for Toro Rosso, even though he had left the pitlane after changing chbadis after his big fall in training.

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