Well that was a lovely race with lots of action all over the place, even the polystyrene blocks had some excitement!

It was great to see that most people there (no matter which team) cheered the new race winner


In a Mercedes dominated era (with Red Bull next best), as a McLaren fan why am I feeling disappointed with finishing 2nd and 4th?

Admittedly in the first couple of laps it did look like 2nd was likely for genuine reasons, and the bad Merc pit call for Lewis did make it seem like a win was likely... ah well, hopefully there will be more excitement for the team in the next few races!

Quote Originally Posted by OptionBase1 View Post
To me, the Hamilton penalty ended up showing how poorly Mercedes performs in traffic. Albon had a damaged car and it still took several laps for Hamilton to pass him once he caught up to him, and only then that was because Albon went off track and had to give up the position. Yes, Hamilton passed many cars by the end, but none were gimme's.

In the end, he was something like 23 seconds behind the leader after being 30 seconds behind after taking the penalty. So, a net gain of 7 seconds in the final 25 laps with "top top" tier gear on the leader.
The Merc's have always been poor in traffic, so it wasn't too surprising that he could "only" get up to 7th from 16th.

It was 17.2s behind at the end apparently, so that is a gain of about 13s (roughly 0.5s per lap), which is quite impressive given that he was having some tough battles on the way.

The team should never have put him in that position tho (and the FIA should have put the "pits closed" boards next to the pit entry, rather than just on the other side of the track), so there were some rather disappointed people there.