2019 United States GP: Bottas vs Hamilton

Lewis Hamilton became World Champion once again, this time at the 2019 United States Grand Prix. The Britishman was however denied victory by a determined Valtteri Bottas.How did the battle develop between the teammates? Let’s take a look at the numbers.

Overall race

Note: The solid lines show an average regression based on adjacent lap times. This means that a line that is higher on the chart, means that on average, that driver was slower than his counterpart.

Normally I do not like to compare drivers with different strategies, but I though that the Mercedes’ battle was among the best of the race, so let’s give it a go.

Both Lewis and Valtteri drove a great race. The Finn was unable to make the tires last during the first stint, and had no option but to try a 2-stop strategy. In the end, the gamble paid off. Bottas didn’t have the pace to challenge Lewis on a one stop strategy. Bottas did 14 laps with the medium tires for his first stint, averaging 1:41.203 per lap. Hamilton, on the other hand, did a first stint of 24 laps, averaging 1:41.266 per lap. Lewis was technically slower when comparing the stints, bit he was only 0.062 seconds away from his teammate while doing 10 more laps. Pretty impressive numbers from Lewis.

Take a look at Bottas’ second stint. From lap 16 until lap 19, Valtteri was mighty fast, but that came with a price. His lap times started to go up, and it appears as if he had taken too much life out of the tires. By lap 33, the hard tires were dead, so Mercedes called the driver for a second and final stop.

After lap 35, it was all about survival for Hamilton. Managing 32 laps with the hard compound was not easy, and Lewis defended as hard as he could against his teammate, but it wasn’t enough. During this time, Bottas was consistently faster than his teammate, and there was no way to stop Bottas from making the overtake.

Credit to Valtteri, this time he didn’t make a mistake, and was able to keep the lap times down while driving in dirty air.

Delta per lap in common

Bottas and Hamilton were extremely even for the first 14 laps. Over this period of time, Bottas was faster than Lewis by only 1.327 seconds in total. After Bottas’ first pit stop, things dramatically changed.

After lap 16, and until lap 23, Bottas was faster than Hamilton by an average of 1.788 seconds per lap. Over this period of time, Bottas’ gained a total of 14.308 seconds over his Mercedes’ counterpart.

Lewis stopped for his first and only pit stop on lap 24. From lap 26, until lap 34, Lewis was faster than Valtteri by an average of 1.116 seconds per lap. Lewis was able to regain 10.045 seconds of the total time lost before his pit stop.

Bottas went for for a final pit stop on lap 35, an since then, he was much faster than Lewis once again. Over the last 20 laps of the race, Bottas was faster than Lewis on 19 of them. The Finn was 0.664 seconds per lap faster on average than Hamilton, which was enough to catch up the Britishman by the end of the race.

Race pace per stint

Bottas’ second stint wasn’t particularly good. It definitely looks like  during laps 16-19, Valtteri took the life out of the tires quite rapidly. His third stint, however, was pretty good, averaging 1:39.033 seconds per lap.

Lewis may have finished in second place, but his tire management was masterful. As we already saw, he was a only around half a tenth slower per lap than Valtteri, even after doing 14 more laps than him. Regarding his second stint, Hamilton was looking really good until lap 49, but then the performance of the tires just dropped of dramatically. Until that lap, Lewis had done only one lap with a time of more than 1:40 (lap 37). Since then, all 7 remaining laps were slower than 1:40, with two of them being over 1:41 per lap.

Gap at the end of the race

Bottas had to fight hard in order to overtake Hamilton. After coming out of the pits for the second time, he had to overcome a delta of 12 seconds in order to claim victory. Until lap 51, it seemed as if Hamilton had enough in the tank to survive the onslaught, but it wasn’t meant to be.

Hamilton started to lose performance quite rapidly due to tire degradation, and Bottas fully took advantage of it. In two laps, Bottas reduced the gap from 3.305 to less than half a second. With DRS, Hamilton just had no defense against Valtteri at the Circuit of the Americas.

Final remarks

Lewis Hamliton became World Champion once again, but we have to give credit to Valtteri Bottas in Austin. His entire weekend was great, and unlike Italy, where he was unable to close the gap, this time he had enough consistency to make the desired overtake. I have been critical of his performances during his time as a Mercedes driver, but he deserves the praise for his result in the USA Grand Prix.

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