Hamilton Wins Battle Of Wills In Bahrain Thriller

Who says Formula One is boring? Bahrain’s tenth anniversary race produced a thriller under the lights, as Lewis Hamilton recorded back-to-back wins and Sergio Perez scored Force India’s first podium since Giancarlo Fisichella at the Belgian Grand Prix in 2009.  Hamilton may have dominated from lights to flag in Malaysia but he certainly had to work for this one; repelling attack after attack from an inspired Nico Rosberg, using all the road and just a little more to take the flag by just one second in a grandstand finish set up by a late-race safety car. 

Rosberg and Hamilton go wheel-to-wheel, but it was the Brit who
came out on top after a hard-fought duel. (Credit: Getty Images)

Although Rosberg was able to score his first pole of the season, the third in a row for Mercedes, it was Hamilton who got the better start, setting a precedent for the rest of the race by robustly forcing his team-mate wide into turn four. Behind, Felipe Massa made a perfect getaway from seventh on the grid to head Sergio Perez and a wheel-spinning Valterri Bottas in the best of the rest scrap, while Kimi Raikkonen found himself boxed out by Fernando Alonso and Jean-Eric Vergne sustained a puncture.

With the Mercedes duo again the class of the field, opening up a comfortable 30 second lead over the battle for third, there were concerns that team orders would become a factor, but these were soon allayed on lap 18, when a DRS-assisted Rosberg lunged down the inside into turn one, only for Hamilton to seize the place back again on exit. Undeterred, Rosberg tried again one lap later with more success, albeit only for a couple of corners as Hamilton forced Rosberg to run deep into turn four and muscled past on the run to the esses. Pitting at the end of the lap for another set of the softer option tyres, Rosberg was forced to run longer, allowing Hamilton to gain a decisive undercut that consolidated his advantage. And with Rosberg opting for a long middle stint on the harder prime tyres, Hamilton was able to stretch the gap out to almost ten seconds when Pastor Maldonado contrived to change the course of the race.

The Lotus had not been a factor all day and was running well outside of the points, when exiting the pits Maldonado simply drove into the side of Esteban Gutierrez’s Sauber, tipping the Mexican into a frightening barrel roll from which he fortunately emerged unscathed. The resultant safety car allowed Rosberg to switch to the option tyres and presented him with a golden opportunity to attack Hamilton, his lead nullified and now forced to run the primes in a 10-lap sprint to the finish. But credit where credit’s due – Hamilton tenaciously stood his ground and against the odds managed to hold a deeply disappointed Rosberg at bay, despite the latter’s tyre advantage and the benefits of DRS, to close to within 11 points of the championship lead.

Scary moment for Gutierrez after being upended by Maldonado,
but the Mexican would walk away. (Credit: Getty Images)

24 seconds back, Perez was a jubilant third for Force India after a tough 2013 season with McLaren which didn’t yield the expected results. The Mexican, whose last podium visit came at Monza in 2012, was crucially able to defend his position from team-mate Nico Hulkenberg at the restart, and as the German faded in the closing laps on worn tyres, was able to build a big enough cushion that even when Daniel Ricciardo's Red Bull worked its way past into fourth, there were not enough laps to catch him. Ricciardo was nonetheless delighted to score his first Red Bull points, following his disqualification from Melbourne and pitstop maladies in Malaysia, which copped him a 10 place grid penalty which forced him to start a lowly 13^th.  Fourth place also meant the Aussie finished ahead of his illustrious team-mate Sebastien Vettel; the four-time champion missed Q3 for the second time in three races and complained of a lack of straight-line speed en-route to sixth, just behind Hulkenberg, who is a remarkable third in the championship having scored points in all three races so far.

In seventh and eighth, Williams twins finished line astern for the second week in succession as Massa again held off Bottas, the safety car intervention ruining any hopes that their three-stop strategies would leapfrog the Force Indias, while rounding out the points in ninth and tenth was certainly not where Ferrari had hoped they would be before the season; much improvements will be needed for Alonso and Raikkonen to mount any sort of challenge on the dominant Mercedes come the start of the European season.  

Elsewhere, Jenson Button's 250^th Grand Prix start ended in disappointment, the McLaren joining team-mate Kevin Magnussen in retirement two laps from home, having run as high as fifth early on.  Daniil Kvyat just missed out on points for the first time in his short F1 career in 11th, while both Lotuses made the finish for the first time this season and Max Chilton's 13th place moves Marussia back ahead of Caterham in the constructors battle.