After a delay of over an hour, a wound-up Hamilton leapt past the cars in front to be right behind Rosberg by lap four.
Urged on by the crowd, not even a slow pitstop could stop Hamilton in his Mercedes as he hunted down his team-mate.
He needn’t have hurried – a gearbox failure took out Rosberg, and Hamilton struck to take his second Silverstone win.
Starting behind the two-stopping Finn, Hamilton managed to go on a one-stop and maintain the same pace. A safety car then made things easy, giving Hamilton another stop.
2018 Azerbaijan GP
Baku ’18 should have belonged to Valtteri Bottas. Opening lap carnage left Alonso to drag his double-punctured McLaren back to the pits, after which he probably told the team “this was my greatest lap ever” for the nth time, as Räikkönen dumped Ocon into the barriers on the same lap.
Verstappen and Ricciardo went at it lap after lap, but the Red Bull skirmish eventually ended in tears with the Australian rear-ending the Dutchman into the first turn and taking both out the race.
Grosjean then dropped his Haas into barriers under the safety car, prompting the famous “I think Ericsson hit us” line.
All this left a huge amount of debris on the track, which the Finn ran over on the pit straight with three laps to go, handing the win to Hamilton.
The Brit shouldn’t have won, but as ever, he somehow did.
2018 German GP
A hydraulics issue left Hamilton 14th on the grid, but this set up one of this most unlikely and arguably one of his greatest wins.
The Mercedes driver picked off cars lap by lap, until he was right behind Ferrari’s Räikkönen in fourth by lap 14.
Bottas pitted to put Hamilton third, and then the heavens opened, quite appropriately, on lap 44 – the same as Hamilton’s famous car number.