Bottas WINS Azerbaijan Grand Prix – Hamilton 2nd for a Mercedes 1-2

Valtteri Bottas managed to turn his pole position at the 2019 Azerbaijan Grand Prix in to a win, with Hamilton second and Vettel third.

For Valtteri Bottas, pole position has been no guarantee of a race win. But in Azerbaijan it was as he held off Lewis Hamilton to take the win, Mercedes fourth one-two in 2019.

Bottas had to throw everything at the race at the start to hold off a charging Hamilton – and again in the closing laps – but he succeeded and now leads Hamilton by a single point in the driver’s title race.

Vettel managed a third place finish for Ferrari, but it was Leclerc who actually managed to lead the race for a while – despite eventually starting in eighth – with a different strategy to the rest of the front runners, but his different tyre choices ultimately saw him finish in fifth, with Red Bull’s Max Verstappen between him and Vettel.

Behind the top three teams (Gasly in the second Red Bull was a DNF), Perez took sixth for Racing Point, Sainz and Norris seventh and eighth for McLaren, Stroll ninth for Racing Point and Raikkonen 10th for Alfa Romeo.

The 2019 F1 season is already starting to look like a walk in the park for Mercedes, but if Leclerc hadn’t had his smash in qualifying, and had had the same tyre strategy as Vettel, he could probably have challenged the Mercedes pair, evidenced by his fastest lap in the race point after he got fresh tyres.