Valtteri Bottas did well to beat teammate Lewis Hamilton to the checkered flag at the 2019 United States GP, but it was Hamilton who claimed the ultimate victory, having secured enough points to win the 2019 Formula One World Driver Championship.
Hamilton is now up to six F1 championship titles, one ahead of the legendary Juan Manuel Fangio and just one short of Michael Schumacher’s record of seven.
Qualifying for the race had hinted at a more exciting race than we got, with the top three teams far more mixed up on the grid than usual. But Ferrari was nowhere on pace when the lights went out. Charles Leclerc finished a distant fourth, and Sebastian Vettel, who had missed out on pole by only 0.012 seconds, seemed to suffer from an issue from the get-go, culminating in a broken suspension on the eighth lap.
The Honda-powered Red Bull had good pace, but Alexander Albon fell to the very back after he was sandwiched between Leclerc and McLaren’s Carlos Sainz on the first lap, resulting in damage and an early pit stop. He made an incredible recovery drive to fifth place from there, while teammate Max Verstappen finished third, just behind Hamilton.
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Verstappen had been hot on the champion’s heels, and had Kevin Magnussen not crashed just before the end of the race — bringing out the double-yellow flags at precisely the best overtaking spot — it’s quite possible Verstappen could have passed his British rival.
Magnussen’s crash was just the final punctuation mark on an awful weekend for home team Haas, which failed to score with either car for the third consecutive race and is currently on pace for its worst championship result since 2016.
McLaren, on the other hand, only seems to have been improving, its drivers finishing seventh and eighth to strengthen its fourth position in the overall constructor’s championship ahead of Renault, which admitted over the weekend that McLaren had surpassed it (a someone embarrassing turn of events, given that Renault began supplying McLaren engines last year).
With two races to go, though, the race for fourth in the championship isn’t completely locked down just yet, and the one for fifth and sixth is even tighter, with Toro Rosso and Racing Point now separated by just a single point.
The penultimate race will take place at the famous Interlagos circuit in Brazil, and after that, it’ll be the season finale in Abu Dhabi.
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Australia | Bahrain | China | Azerbaijan | Spain | Monaco | Canada | France | Austria | Great Britain | Germany | Hungary | Belgium | Italy | Singapore | Russia | Japan | United States | Mexico | Brazil | Abu Dhabi
Kurt Verlin was born in France and lives in the United States. Throughout his life he was always told French was the language of romance, but it was English he fell in love with. He likes cats, music, cars, 30 Rock, Formula 1, and pretending to be a race car driver in simulators; but most of all, he just likes to write about it all. See more articles by Kurt.