British GP: Lewis Hamilton Defiles Puncture To Win Race In Silverstone

Fantastic as it may seem by the way Lewis Hamilton claimed his sixth Silverstone race victory despite sustaining a punctured tire that could have cost him the race. 

Hamilton, in the qualifying session, lost control of his car and spun on the gravel in Q2, yet he led the session to claim the pole for the seventh time in Silverstone. A similar situation arose midway in the final lap when the left-front tyre of his car burst open. 

While Hamilton was racing on a failure tyre, Red Bull's Max Verstappen was just four corners behind, and slowing down would simply have handed the Dutch driver the victory. Rather, he kept on the pace and crossed the finish line quickest and Verstappen did +5.856s later to be second. 

"Up until the last lap, everything was relatively smooth sailing," said Hamilton. "The tyres felt great. Valterri was really pushing incredibly hard and I was doing some management of that tyre and h looked like he wasn't doing any." 

Just as Hamilton, his teammate Valterri Bottas' car also suffered a failure in his left-front tyre with two laps left to go. The Finn driver, as a result, had to limp through the remaining laps and finished in eleventh place behind Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel. 

Ferrari's Charles Leclerc, for the first time since Austrian GP, made a podium position after finishing third behind Verstappen. Renault Daniel Ricciardo finished fourth and McLaren's Lando Norris claimed the fifth position. 

Finishing second narrowed the gap between Verstappen (52) and Bottas (58) in the driver standings to six points while Hamilton maintains the lead with 88 points.