However, Lewis Hamilton eventually won two points in the race for the German Grand Prix. An unexpected circumstance in which the Briton himself no longer believed eleven laps before the end of the race. At that time, he asked the team via radio to end the race early and to park his car in the garage. Before that, he had just spun for the second time in the race.
After spinning, racing engineer Peter Bonnington told him to drive to the pits where his tires would be replaced. But Hamilton no longer had the will. “Retire the car,” Hamilton demanded over the radio. But the team encouraged him not to resign. “Negative, Lewis, negative,” was Bonnington’s response. “There are always possibilities,” he reminded him, explaining that there could be another phase of the safety car. And this one also performed. Hamilton was in a hopeless 15th place after the stop, but after a new phase of the safety car, which was triggered by his teammate Bottas, he was able to make up for a few places. And thanks to the penalty received by both Alfa Romeo racers, he unexpectedly won two points for ninth place.
Nevertheless, his frustration in the cockpit was understandable. Last but not least, the race was for him before, until the 29th lap onwards, a real failure. That’s when Hamilton, otherwise in the lead, flew off the track on dry track tires. “These tires are very risky,” Hamilton had previously told the team. A few seconds later, he was already crashing into a protective fence, leading to an unplanned stop. “Box, Box, I lost my front wings,” Hamilton said as he turned into the pits. Bonnington confirmed, but the team didn’t have time to prepare well for the stop. "Inter ... do you want Inters?", So Bonnington. Hamilton with a slight nervousness: "Yes, man ..." At that moment, he was almost standing in front of the team garage and the mechanics just had to bring new tires.
And the stop turned into real chaos, as Hamilton stood for more than 50 seconds as mechanics frantically ran around looking for tires. “To be honest, I don’t even remember,” Hamilton said when asked what he meant when he had to stand in front of the team garage for an eternity. "I was probably honestly angry and angry at myself for making a mistake in the previous turn."
“At Lewis, we messed it up a lot, it couldn’t have been worse,” adds chief engineer Andrew Shovlin, explaining, “Before just one lap, we just replaced the tires (for a dry track) when conditions got worse again. Then in the next lap he slipped off the track in the same place as Charles Leclerc. ” The chaos at the Lewis stop, however, was also caused by the fact that Bottas would actually have to wrap in the pits. “We were ready to stop at Valtteri, but when Lewis needed a new nose for the car, we weren’t ready for it and we lost a lot of time because of it,” Shovlin explains of the additional problem. For Hamilton, luck in misfortune: Since Bottas did not see the target flag, he was able to increase his advantage over him even more, even though he wanted to resign before.
