A warm summer’s day, at one of the sport’s most demanding circuits, and some softer tyres was all it took to knock the Mercedes juggernaut off course at the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix.
The two black cars that had looked unbeatable in the first four races of the season suddenly did not look so special. Their high performance became their Achilles’ Heel and they tore their tyres to shreds around the high-speed sweeps of Silverstone.
If anyone was going to benefit from a situation like this, it was always going to be Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, and the Dutchman turned in one of those days when he looks irresistible.
Give Verstappen a sniff and he locks onto it like a pit bull. Early in the race, his team were warning him to be careful of his tyres as he homed in on the Mercedes in front of him.
“Mate,” he replied to his engineer Giampiero Lambiase, “this is the only chance. I’m not backing off and driving like a grandma.”
He kept pushing, of course, and the race surrendered to him, as Mercedes’ tyres fell apart. And the result was one of the most unexpected victories for some time.
Whether this turns out to be Red Bull’s only chance to beat Mercedes remains to be seen, but it’s certainly the case that a perfect storm of circumstance emerged to make a team that had been threatening to win every race this season suddenly look vulnerable.
“I enjoy the situation,” said Mercedes F1 boss Toto Wolff, “because everyone said it would be a walk in the park for Mercedes and it wasn’t a walk in the park. We didn’t have the quickest car and maybe not even the second quickest car.”