In a race with some ups and downs, Lewis Hamilton achieved seventh place in the Las Vegas Formula 1 Grand Prix – helping Mercedes minimize losses to Ferrari in the Constructors’ Championship, to enter the final round still in second place. In the meantime, he was involved in collisions with Carlos Sainz (Ferrari) and Oscar Piastri (McLaren), for which he was not at fault.
The seven-time world champion said that, after recovering from the initial incident, he had the situation with Piastri where the puncture occurred when he had already passed the pit entry: ‘It was a truly challenging race. I started with the hard tires, which was complicated at the beginning. I suffered a big hit from [Carlos] Sainz in turn one and then tried not to hit other cars in front of me. I dropped several places. After that, I was focused on recovering in the pack and I was feeling great. The tires were good and the pace was strong. I went inside Piastri and I’m not sure what exactly happened. I felt a big hit from behind, but I think it was a racing incident. I didn’t have an immediate puncture and as I passed the pit entry, I felt the rear moving. I had to do a whole slow lap. I was grateful that I was still able to recover from being back in last place to score points’.
According to Hamilton, the Mercedes W14 has qualities, but they are difficult to exploit: ‘There are strengths in our car, but sometimes it is difficult to extract all its performance. That’s what happened yesterday in qualifying, but I’m glad we were able to show our pace in the race. I’m also grateful that the race was exciting’.
Although he admits that Las Vegas exceeded his expectations, the British driver emphasized that skeptics about this race were wrong: ‘I wasn’t expecting the track to be so good, but there was a lot of competition and overtaking opportunities. For all those who were so pessimistic about the weekend, I think Las Vegas showed that they were wrong’.
