The Russian roulette wheel that cost Norris a debut F1 win

Mercedes, trying to win a championship, didn’t feel as carefree. Hamilton and Bottas stayed out after their banker laps and did a prep lap for another flyer. Red Bull covered Mercedes with Perez. Pretty much everyone else pitted for slicks after posting their inters time.

That’s how Norris set his first pole position from Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari and Russell. Hamilton’s earlier lap stood only as fourth-quickest, Bottas seventh.

Just as would be the case on Sunday, there was no obvious right answer in the moment the decisions had to be made.

Front wing flap

Sochi is usually a rear-limited track. But at such cool temperatures as this – the track was 23C at the start – the front left takes enough stress that it is prone to graining. The softer the compound the worse the problem.

Mercedes and McLaren added some front flap to try to help keep that graining at bay for the medium compound tyres they’d chosen for Hamilton and Norris respectively.

Starting Tyre Choice

The medium (C4) gave more traction off the grid and was faster for about four laps. Thereafter its graining left-front made the more robust hard (C3) the faster tyre. The top five all chose the medium, with Fernando Alonso and Perez taking the hard, along with the back row-starting Verstappen and Leclerc.

So all those choices played out like they did. The right-hand side of the grid had more rubber down than the left, allowing Sainz to be faster away than Russell and to hold him out of Norris’ tow. As Norris then moved right to block the fast-starting Hamilton, Sainz went the other way and slipstreamed his Ferrari into the lead. Hamilton was boxed in and completed the first lap in seventh.

Russell’s Williams wasn’t anything like the third-fastest car, was around 1sec per lap slower than a McLaren. But it was running in third place and was fast down the straights. So Sainz and Norris escaped from the pack. Hamilton, in sixth, could make no move on Daniel Ricciardo’s McLaren ahead of him. Just as at Monza, he didn’t have enough end-of-straight advantage.

Verstappen made great progress from the back, passed Bottas on lap six with barely any resistance from the Mercedes driver and before the race was too old was only three places behind Hamilton.

Sainz led until he overworked his front-left, allowing Norris to slipstream past and into the lead. Sainz pitted soon afterwards. With this and Russell’s similarly early stop, Norris and Ricciardo led a McLaren 1-2, with Hamilton frustrated in his attempts at finding a way by.

Ricciardo stayed out for another nine laps until his front left began to surrender and until then Hamilton just bided his time, keeping out of the dirty air and looking after his tyres. Had Ricciardo been able to run much longer, Hamilton would have been within undercut range of Sergio Perez’s Red Bull just behind, but Sergio couldn’t go for that too early as he needed to pit late enough that the mediums he’d be obliged to take didn’t have too long a stint to do. The same applied to Verstappen who was only 3sec behind Hamilton when Ricciardo pitted.

So it was a relief to Hamilton when one McLaren peeled off in front of him. The other was 13sec up the road. That was the gap standing between him and his 100th career victory. He had 21 laps to close it down. In clear air for the first time, Hamilton’s true pace was finally revealed and in the next three laps he pulled himself well out of the reach of the Red Bulls. Besides, Verstappen’s front left had taken a beating in his charge through the field even though it was of a harder compound. Hamilton and Verstappen pitted on lap 26, Norris a lap later.

Perez ran in the lead on his hard tyres for another eight laps and was set to rejoin third but for a delay removing the right-rear wheel. As he anticipated the green light he spun up the wheel, which delayed things even further and meant he came out behind Sainz and Ricciardo, both of whom he was able to repass to go back to a distant third. Verstappen was sixth but in trouble very quickly with the front-left medium and then overtaken by Alonso’s Alpine.

With 10 laps to go Hamilton was within 1.3sec of Norris. But that looked to be about as close as he could get. When he tried to get closer he’d get understeer and thus not be able to be close enough to get within DRS range. Even on the odd occasion when he did, he’d get understeer onto he pit straight and the DRS would only claw him back up to the McLaren  rather than allow him to pass it. He was running out of ideas and there was that front-left to consider. Norris, lapping in  clear air, was having an easier time looking after the critical tyre and it really did look like it was all under control for him.

The rain arrived on lap 47. Bottas was brought in from his anonymous 14th place and fitted with inters. His sector times informed Mercedes – and everyone else – that they were way quicker than the slicks. Norris and Hamilton were called in, but each argued and stayed out. “Lando went off I think in Turn 5 on one lap,” said Hamilton, “and I was like ‘OK, OK, stay out, it’s most likely going to happen again, I’ll try to catch him out’. Then they called me in and I was like: ‘Yeah, but he’s right there!’ I only had three laps to catch up 24 seconds [if I came in], so it was like ‘no way’. I wasn’t convinced. The next lap it rained more and I was definitely more convinced then, so I came in.” The lap before, Verstappen and Sainz had pitted, as had Kimi Räikkönen. It would boost the finishing positions of all three, securing Verstappen second, Sainz third and Räikkönen seventh.

Norris stayed out, finally calling it wrong after having called it right all weekend up until that moment. He slid off two laps from the end just as Hamilton’s inters-shod Merc was about to devour him anyway.  Driving slowly back to the pits, he was back in eighth when he rejoined. Leclerc was similarly forlorn after making the exact same wrong call, having got himself up with Verstappen and Sainz. Just one more decision that turned out to be wrong.