Pérez takes advantage of late restart to take victoryHamilton and Verstappen both fail to score a pointThat
Lewis Hamilton might put so much as a finger wrong has come to seem almost inconceivable, so deft his every touch and so sure for so long. Yet at the Azerbaijan
Grand Prix the faintest, erroneous brush of his steering wheel proved enormously costly. It left Hamilton and his Mercedes team understandably shellshocked given the world champion had a potentially significant lead in the title fight in his grasp. That lead disappeared in a puff of brake dust as for once the Hamilton magic turned against him.
The race was won by Red Bull’s Sergio Pérez, a superb drive for his second F1 victory, but it was overshadowed by the drama whereby both title protagonists, Hamilton and Max Verstappen, failed to score a point. Verstappen suffered a tyre failure late in the race, costing him a likely win, and Hamilton made a highly unusual error to drop from second to 15th on the penultimate lap. Both incidents will elicit serious investigations.