Formula One’s ‘racing gods’ smiled on Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes in Sunday’s Bahrain season-opener but round one of what promises to be a far bigger fight showed Red Bull’s Max Verstappen will be hard to beat.
Bold strategy and supreme racecraft won the day after Verstappen, who had led testing and every practice session, started from pole position with a faster car only to finish second.
The 23-year-old Dutch driver would surely have won had he not gone off track while passing Hamilton on fresher tires with four laps remaining, and then been ordered to hand back the lead in a key moment of a nail-biting race.
“If somebody would have told me this is going to be the result o…
Keep on reading: Round one to Hamilton but Verstappen will be hard to beat