Lewis Hamilton expects this season’s F1 title race to go down to the wire after round two of his 2021 campaign.
Hamilton staged a miraculous recovery from crashing at Imola on Sunday to finish second behind Max Verstappen, flipping the race result from the season opener in Bahrain three weeks earlier.
It leaves the seven-time world champion a solitary point clear of Verstappen in the drivers’ standings by virtue of the bonus point for the fastest lap at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.
And Hamilton said: “This is really the first time in a long time that Red Bull have had a championship-winning car so I think it’s going to be close all the way through the year, and it’s just going to be hopefully more and more of these battles.”
For Hamilton, the race result was something of a lucky escape having managed to limp his way back to the pits after hitting the barriers midway through the race in an overtaking manoeuvre gone wrong.
A feisty clash between Hamilton’s teammate Valtteri Bottas and the driver potentially lined up to replace him, George Russell, brought out the safety car moments later and enabled Hamilton to rejoin the race still in contention.
Red Bull clearly boasted the quickest team in race one, while team principal Christian Horner suggested their rivals had had the upper hand in Imola.
“I think they maybe had a quicker car than us today but it’s great to get that first victory of the season under our belts,” he said. “Now we need to build on this momentum for the remainder of the season and we are going to have to go some way to keep Mercedes under pressure.”
Bottas and Russell, meanwhile, were left pointing the finger of blame for their coming together, which forced them both out of the race. Russell accused his rival of a lack of respect and putting them both in harm’s way, suggesting were he not a potential rival for the Mercedes seat in 2022 that the Finn would have driven differently.
But Bottas rejected the accusations, saying, “I am always going to defend against any driver. I am not keen to lose any positions. It was normal defending. I was doing my thing and, whoever I was defending, it would have been exactly the same.”
