2020 Russian Grand Prix | Formula 1

Valtteri takes victory for the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team in Sochi, with Lewis in P3

• Valtteri secured his ninth victory in Formula One – his second of the 2020 F1 season and second at the Russian Grand Prix
• Lewis recovered from receiving two five-second time penalties for a practice start violation, which he served at his pit stop, to complete the podium finishers in third
• Today’s result marked Lewis’s 150th Grand Prix start for the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team
• Valtteri scored the fastest lap for the 15th time in his F1 career
• Lewis (205 points) leads the Drivers’ Championship by 44 points from Valtteri (161 points)
• The Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team (366 points) leads Red Bull Racing (192 points) by 174 points in the Constructors’ Championship
• Dom Riefstahl, Race Support Team Leader and Test Engineer, accepted the Constructors’ trophy on behalf of the team

What’s a practice start violation? As Lewis says he’s been doing these practice starts for most of his career, so perhaps its the FIA wanting to change the order of finishers and hamper Hamilton in his quest to equal Michael Schumakers 7 world records.

In any case, it’s not going to happen and Hamilton will equal those stats this year anyway.

Valtteri Bottas Says

What a feeling! It’s been a little while since my last win, but I knew there would be opportunities heading into the race and luckily things went my way this time.

It was a bit tricky at the start because an insect hit my visor just as I was entering the braking zone, which meant I couldn’t really see where to brake and so I went deep. But I knew it was going to be a long race and with the Medium tyre, there would be chances later on. Lewis then had his penalty, and once I was in clean air, the pace was really strong, and I was able to control everything without any real concerns.

Now I need to keep this momentum up. There are quite a few races to go and you just never know, so I’ll keep pushing, I won’t give up and we’ll see how it turns out in the end.

Lewis Hamilton Says

Firstly, I want to say a big thank you to all the fans who came out this weekend, I hope you enjoyed the race. It wasn’t a great day for me, but it is what it is. We need to go through everything and understand exactly what went on to get those two penalties.

That obviously dropped me back and the first stint on the Soft was also challenging, as I was trying to go as far as I could on that tyre. I think I did pretty well on the Soft and from then, it was about trying to recover as much as possible.

It was just one of those days, but I’m grateful that I still managed to get a podium, bag some points and didn’t lose as much as I could have done. Congratulations to Valtteri on the win, and I’ll take the points and move forward.

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