Formula One Features — July 2018

Lewis Hamilton's two consecutive victories in races Ferrari was expected to dominate have swung the title battle pendulum his way. The Mercedes driver arrived in Hockenheim trailing Sebastian Vettel by eight points and left Budapest, ten days later, leading the championship by 24 points, a swing of 32 points in his favour, that came on tracks where he was supposed to lose ground.

In the space of just one week, both Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel felt the weight of home defeats, the British driver recovering from last to second place in Silverstone, where the Ferrari driver won comfortably, and then with Vettel crashing out of the lead at the German Grand Prix, to hand his championship rival an unlikely victory, after he started the race from just 14th place on the grid.

Formula One people tend to be quite blase about other forms of racing in many areas, one of them being the amount of mechanical failures cars suffer in Endurance, Indy Cars or rallying. You see, for the last decade or more when a driver fails to complete a Grand Prix this normally happens because of some incident, as the technical regulations have pushed the teams and the engine manufacturers to produce bullet proof machinery, the only way to avoid grid penalties for replacing Power Units or gearboxes.