ISTANBUL 2020

Istanbul Park. November 15, 2020. The track surface is new. Fresh tarmac laid in the weeks before the race — bitumen rising to the surface in the cold, grip almost absent.[47] It is raining.

Lewis Hamilton wins by thirty-one seconds.[49]

The 2020 Formula One World Championship was supposed to be twenty-two rounds.[48]

It becomes seventeen.[48]

A virus that began reshaping the world in early 2020 forces the season to stop before it starts. The teams arrive in Melbourne expecting to race. Three days before the Australian Grand Prix — the traditional opening round — a McLaren team member tests positive and the team withdraws; the next morning, the race is cancelled outright. The start of the championship is pushed back to July. For nearly four months, there is no racing.[48]

When the season starts in July, the venues are empty. The first eight rounds run behind closed doors, without spectators.[48] Thirteen Grands Prix from the original calendar do not happen at all. Instead the sport races twice in Austria, twice at Silverstone, at Mugello — a circuit that had never held a World Championship round — and at Portimão, where the Portuguese Grand Prix returns for the first time since 1996.

Hamilton wins eleven of them.[52]

He finishes the season with 347 points.[52] Valtteri Bottas, his teammate and the last driver still mathematically able to challenge him when the title is settled, ends on 223.[52][47] The margin is 124 points.

Before Turkey, he has already done something else. At Round 12 — Portimão, the Portuguese Grand Prix — Hamilton takes his 92nd victory, breaking the record of 91 career wins that had belonged to Michael Schumacher.[48] Now the other record waits two rounds later, in a different country, in the rain.

Istanbul Park is a circuit the Formula 1 calendar abandoned in 2011.[47] The 2020 race is a return. In the interval, the surface has been resurfaced — fresh tarmac laid, the old rubber and rubber-mark memory of thousands of previous race laps stripped away.[47]

The consequence is immediate. There is almost no grip.

Fresh asphalt does not behave like worn asphalt. The bitumen migrates to the surface. In cold November temperatures it stays slick. The traction coefficient that drivers expect from a mature race surface — the kind that has been scrubbed in by years of tyre compounds and rubber deposits — is simply not there.[47]

Friday practice confirms it. Cars slide. Lap times in first practice run roughly ten seconds slower than the circuit’s previous Grand Prix — fifteen to twenty seconds off projected qualifying pace. Teams scramble to recalibrate setup assumptions built around normal grip levels. Pirelli, unaware of the resurfacing until the weekend, has brought its three hardest dry compounds to a track that cannot put heat into them.[47]

Qualifying produces an unusual grid.

Lance Stroll, driving for the Racing Point team in a car that has underperformed expectations for most of the season, takes pole position with a lap of 1:47.765.[50] It is his first career Formula 1 pole.[47] Verstappen qualifies second in the Red Bull, Pérez third in the other Racing Point.[50]

Hamilton is sixth.[50]

His Q3 time is 1:52.560 — nearly five seconds off Stroll’s pole.[50] The Mercedes requires seven laps to generate proper heat in its tyre compound. A Q3 lap gives you one fast lap, sometimes two. Seven laps of warm-up is not feasible. The circuit does not respond to the car. The car does not respond to the circuit.[47]

Bottas, Hamilton’s only realistic championship rival, qualifies ninth.[50]

The grid does not reflect the championship stakes. The car that will settle the title is on the third row.

Rain falls half an hour before the start and soaks the circuit. The field lines up on full wet tyres — every team except Williams, whose two cars gamble on intermediates from the pit lane.[47]

Hamilton pits on lap 8.[51]

The stop is 23.860 seconds.[51] He swaps the full wets for intermediates. Then he does not pit again.

The race runs to 58 laps.[49] Hamilton completes 50 of them on that single stint. The intermediate tyre degrades. It wears. The treaded rubber that channels water away from the contact patch gradually disappears. At the end of the race, what Hamilton is driving on is an intermediate tyre that has been worn into something close to a slick.[47]

It is not conventional strategy. The conventional reading would be a second stop: trade old tyres for new ones, lose position, gain pace. The pit window for a potential second stop opens and closes. Hamilton does not use it. With no Safety Car periods and the surface drying slowly, he manages the wear and the temperature of one set of tyres to the end.[47]

Stroll leads all but three of the first 35 laps. On lap 36 Racing Point brings him in for a new set of intermediates; he struggles on the new rubber and falls to ninth by the flag.[47][51] Hamilton inherits the lead.[47]

He does not relinquish it.

Bottas’s afternoon disintegrates. Contact with Esteban Ocon on the opening lap leaves his Mercedes with steering damage; he spins six times during the race and finishes fourteenth, a lap down.[47][49]

The chequered flag falls on lap 58.[49]

Hamilton crosses the line. He has won the race. He has finished ahead of Bottas — the one condition that mattered. The championship is settled.[47]

Seventh. He has won his seventh World Drivers’ Championship, equalling the record Michael Schumacher set.[47]

There are no spectators. The race is run behind closed doors; the grandstands at Istanbul Park are empty.[47] The pandemic that shaped the entire season is still reshaping the world outside the paddock. The championship has been won at a circuit Formula 1 had not visited for nine years, on a track that barely had grip, from sixth on the grid, on tyres worn down nearly to slicks.

None of those conditions were ideal. All of them happened.

The record Hamilton equalled belongs to Michael Schumacher.

Schumacher won his first championship in 1994.[54] Benetton. He was twenty-five. The following year he won again with the same team.[54] Then Ferrari.

Five championships with Ferrari: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004.[54] The fifth in a row broke Juan Manuel Fangio’s record of consecutive titles, which had stood for nearly fifty years.[54] In 2002 he won eleven Grands Prix — a record at the time.[54] In 2004, thirteen of eighteen.[54]

Seven championships total.[54] The record stood from 2004 until 2020.

Hamilton’s seven arrive differently. The 2008 title with McLaren,[70] then six at Mercedes: 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020.[35] Two different eras, two different cars, two different technical regulations frameworks — the naturally-aspirated V8 era and the hybrid power unit era that arrived in 2014.[34][35]

The comparison between them — Schumacher’s seven and Hamilton’s seven — is a question for historians and anyone who watched both. The context differs, the competition differs, and the technical landscape differs. The people who argue it will not agree, and they will not agree for good reasons.

What is recorded is this: two drivers. Seven titles each. The same number, reached by different routes, across different decades.

Istanbul Park. November 2020. The stands are empty. The tarmac is new. The tyres are worn down to nothing. The championship is decided.[47]

Seven.