Lewis Hamilton won his second Grand Prix in a row in Bahrain, and for the second race in a row finished one spot ahead of his Mercedes teammate Nico Rosberg. The two Mercedes were the class of the field, finishing one second apart but 24 seconds ahead of Force India’s Sergio Perez, who took third place. Two teammates up front and a 24-second gap to third, where is the fun in that I hear you asking? It is a lot of fun when team orders are out the window.
To those who tuned out for the Bahrain Grand Prix with the opinion that the New F1 is boring, you missed one of the best races I’ve seen in recent memory. Mercedes had the race all to themselves and put on an exciting performance with Rosberg and Hamilton dueling for the lead coming into the first round of pit stops. Rosberg ran an additional two laps after Hamilton hit the box and that separated the two for the majority of the race but they would be brought back together at the end.
An incident involving Pastor Maldonado ramming his Lotus into Esteban Gutierrez’s Sauber sending him into a tumble (and quite a spectacular somersault) brought the safety car out. The end result was a 10-second stop and go for Maldonado and it erased over a nine-second lead that Hamilton held over his teammate at that point.
A ten lap sprint to the finish it was then. Hamilton on medium tires; Rosberg on the softer tire. This gave Rosberg the handling advantage. As I mentioned before there were no team orders here as Hamilton defended superbly against his teammate who was trying everything to get around him. He eventually got away by a little over a second as Rosberg attempted to care for his car before making one last go at the win. He closed the gap back to under a second for a brief period but couldn’t mount another wheel to wheel charge on the final lap.
The battle for positions on track wasn’t restricted to the boys in Mercedes. The two Red Bulls were very racy with each other. At one point current World Champion Sebastian Vettel was told to move over for his teammate Daniel Ricciardo, who has shown great speed and absolutely has not been intimidated by Vettel on track this year.
The final restart had the two Force India cars with Perez in third and Nico Hulkenberg in fourth just ahead of the two Red Bulls. Perez on the soft tires and Hulkenberg on mediums let Perez get away and set up a fantastic battle between Hulkenberg and Ricciardo who was on the softs as well. Ricciardo was trying everything to get around Hulkenberg so that he could try to attack Perez for the last spot on the podium. Eventually he did, and closed up a four second gap on Perez. There weren’t enough laps left for Ricciardo though: he finished a few tenths behind Perez in fourth.
It was an exciting race from start to finish with battles for every position in the points. If the rest of the races are even half as exciting as this one I can’t imagine there will be anybody left to say the New F1 is boring.
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