2020 Bahrain Grand Prix

USPA NEWS - Lewis wins the 2020 Bahrain Grand Prix with Valtteri in P8

Lewis secured his 95th F1 victory today ““ his fourth in Bahrain and eleventh of the 2020 season

Valtteri suffered a puncture at the race restart, but fought through the field to finish P8

Today´s result marks the 150th race led in the 225th race start for the Mercedes works team in F1

Lewis (332 points) leads the Drivers´ Championship by 131 points from Valtteri (201 points)

The Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team (533 points) leads Red Bull Racing (274 points) by 259 points in the Constructors´ Championship

Richard Warrington, no. 2 mechanic on car #77, accepted the Constructors´ trophy on behalf of the team

Lewis Hamilton

Today is a reminder for all of us that this is a dangerous sport. It was shocking to see Romain´s accident and I´m just so grateful that the Halo did its job and credit to the FIA medical team who were straight on the scene. For Romain to be able to walk away from an accident like that just shows what an incredible job F1 and the FIA have done in their quest for safety. Physically it was such a demanding race. Max pushed me all the way and he had a lot of speed today. I was struggling a little bit with the car sliding around, but I just had enough to be able to respond to Max´s quick laps when it mattered. I was a little cautious how it would play out at the end of the race once Max pitted, but I´m so thankful to my team because they made the right calls all day on the strategy. What a privilege it is to be able to get another result like this.

Valtteri Bottas

I´m so glad that Romain is ok ““ that´s really the most important thing today and I´m very relieved he was able to escape such a big accident. I had a puncture at the restart of the race; I don´t think there was any contact and I didn´t see any debris either, so I´m not quite sure what caused it. I tried fighting my way through the field, but we had a bigger wing than most of the others, so it wasn´t easy to get through the train of cars. At the very end, I had yet another puncture, but fortunately that was under the Safety Car and I didn´t lose any more positions. I´ll need to look at what I can do better next week; the track layout will be different, but a lot of the characteristics will also stay the same, so there´s certainly a lot to learn from this week. Hopefully, I´ll have better luck next weekend.

Toto Wolff

First of all, I want to say thank you to the FIA and F1 for having given us these incredibly safe racing cars. Today´s events show that the introduction of the Halo was tremendously important. I also want to thank the marshals as well as Dr. Ian Roberts and Alan van der Merwe who helped Romain escape the scene. As far as I know, Romain is ok, and I wish him the best possible recovery and I hope his family is alright despite having to witness these awful pictures. For our team, it was another bittersweet race; on the one hand, I´m very happy for the team and Lewis.

The car showed strong performance today and the strategy team was on its A game. Unfortunately, Valtteri had more bad luck this weekend with his puncture. We need to find a way to break the pattern of him losing races for reasons that are beyond his control. Valtteri could have won a few more races this year and it´s just a shame that he needs to cope with these results. But it will make him stronger and now he just needs to give his best in these last two races and secure P2 in the championship. I have no doubt that next year will be very strong for him. I´m also sorry for the disappointment of Racing Point, but happy that Lance escaped unhurt. We need to analyse what happened on Sergio´s car and investigate to make sure we can avoid these DNFs in the future.

Andrew Shovlin

It was a huge relief to see that Romain was ok. The incident looked terrifying, but thankfully he was able to get out safely. It´s good that the FIA will review all areas to find out what lessons can be learnt. Well done also to Alan and Ian in the medical car along with the marshals, it was a very rapid and brave response from all of them. Congratulations to Lewis, he managed the race brilliantly and was just about able to keep it under control, but the extra Hard tyre that Red Bull carried into the race left us with a bit of a weakness. The final stint was a bit awkward as there were moments in the race where a Safety Car would have been difficult to manage; however, by the time the Safety Car did come towards the end, we knew the race wouldn´t restart so we kept Lewis out on his old tyres.

Valtteri had more than his fair share of bad luck; he had a poor getaway from the grid which just looks like it was low grip on the P2 spot, there wasn´t anything obviously wrong with the start itself. He then picked up a front right puncture on the opening lap after the restart, so we had no choice but to stop and that dropped him to the back. The recovery from there was a bit difficult, we´re clearly carrying a bigger wing than most and it was tricky to get through the cars quickly. To top his day off, he picked up another puncture towards the end of the race, so he´ll no doubt be looking forward to a less eventful race next week. We´ve got the short circuit to contend with and a few areas that we need to be looking to improve, but it should be an interesting challenge.