It was a fairly simple afternoon for Lewis Hamilton after few incidents played into his hands. Despite starting in P2, the Briton did not enjoy the greatest of starts. Red Bull’s Max Verstappen shortly passed him into that position.

Shortly after teammate Valtteri Bottas pitted, Hamilton took the lead. As he passed Bottas, he continued to work on his original Medium tires, to ensure he built a large enough time gap.

The virtual safety car coming out because of Esteban Ocon’s incident only helped Hamilton’s cause. Later, after Max Verstappen’s tire blowout, the task only became easier for Hamilton – although his engineer wanted to play it quite cautiously.

Lewis Hamilton was far ahead in front of Verstappen

Just as Hamilton exited the pit lane with a lead of around 1.5 seconds ahead of Bottas, his race engineer Peter “Bono” Bonnington continued saying, “Delta, delta, delta”. To which Hamilton responded, “Calm down man”.

The worry for Hamilton’s race cordon might have been the threat of Valtteri Bottas. With Max out of the race due to a tire blowout, the Finn driver, originally racing in P3, charged forward in an attempt to get closer to Hamilton.

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However, Hamilton had already distanced himself enough from Bottas at the time. Despite the real Safety Car coming out, it did not cause a significant slowdown in the ‘delta time’ between him and Bottas.

Hamilton eventually went into the pits at around Lap 54, with just about nine laps remaining. Having built a lead of 35 seconds over Bottas, he comfortably exited the pit lane with the gap intact of around 1.5 seconds.

Hamilton believes delta time was ‘not an issue’ in the race

Hamilton never felt a strong reason to be worried about losing the lead. As the data suggested, the safety car did slow down Bottas himself. And so, Hamilton would have made it out of the pits with ease, anyway.

Speaking in the post-race press conference, Hamilton stated, “And delta, I think just overly cautious and, for whatever reason, the Safety Car was out.”

“And the delta wasn’t an issue at that point. We were quite down on the delta.” concluded Hamilton on the subject.

It is fair to say that the Mercedes driver did have his fair share of luck in the race. Then again, fortune favors the brave. On Sunday, it was a 93rd race victory for the gutsy Lewis Hamilton.