It was Lewis Hamilton all over in the Belgian Grand Prix and finally he won the F1 race this Sunday. It was not the prettiest demonstration of his race-craft but it was surely among the most defiant, as he held off a charging Sebastian Vettel with a prize example of thou-shalt-not-pass front running, halving his rival’s championship lead from 14 points to seven. “I told you what I was here for,” he said, after his fifth win this season reignited his exhilarating duel with the one driver able to hold a candle to his talent. “And I wasn’t leaving here without it.”
This was a weekend to reaffirm Hamilton’s stature as perhaps the finest British sportsman of his generation. While Andy Murray might reasonably take issue with that claim, the Scot spends his Sundays hitting a tennis ball, not hurling a delicately-tuned machine around the forested majesty of Spa, where a ride through the steepling Rivage generates G-forces more familiar to fighter pilots. “There are only three sports,” Ernest Hemingway once argued. “Bullfighting, motor racing and mountaineering. All the rest are merely games.”
As a personality, Hamilton continues to polarise, both by his esoteric fashion sense – he changed straight from his race overalls on Sunday into off-the-shoulder black dungarees bought on his latest trip to New York – and his mercurial mood swings. But in this chapter for Formula One, he is without peer. Just 24 hours after he had equalled Michael Schumacher’s 68 pole positions, he underlined his quicksilver racing instincts by thwarting Vettel despite carrying less pace and inferior tyres, as well as negotiating the controversial intervention of a safety car.
Lewis Hamilton won the race, continuing the sequence this season that has seen no single driver take back-to-back wins. Proof in itself how the advantage has swung between the lead protagonists Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel, who was second in Spa. But while the pair went wheel to wheel only twice over the 44 laps, their battle was absolutely intense, lasted the full distance and, crucially, was telling in how the remainder of the season might unfold after Hamilton narrowed the gap to his rival to just seven points.
The pair had not engaged in a duel that saw them repeatedly exchanging places but it had been very much a hard-fought battle that was appreciated by the crowd of 100,000 in the Ardennes. Hamilton, in his 200th grand prix, had led from pole to take his 58th career win and that pole – equalling Michael Schumacher’s record of 68 – turned out to be absolutely crucial given how closely matched the pair were. Vettel remained within a second and a half of Hamilton for almost the entire race, demonstrating a pace that puts the Ferrari much closer to Mercedes on a circuit that was expected to strongly favour the characteristics of Hamilton’s car.
