What more could Williams have done?

In the end this was probably the result most people predicted, but it certainly wasn't the race anyone expected.

Lewis Hamilton ultimately sent the Silverstone crowd home happy by scoring his third British Grand Prix victory, but for the first 20-odd laps of this race we all wondered whether Williams would steal his thunder.

From the moment Felipe Massa and Valtteri Bottas shot away from the second row of the grid, outdragging both gripless Mercedes into the fast right-hand sweeper at Abbey, hopes were raised for a different kind of contest to the one Formula 1 has become accustomed to over most of the early races of 2015. Suddenly, we had four cars potentially fighting for victory, rather than two.

Or did we? Was this to be the sort of competition F1 has generally been missing for so long - two teams genuinely slugging it out for glory?

Or would Mercedes, dominator of F1 for the past 18 months, simply have too much in hand for Williams to handle?

Maldonado was among the first-lap casualties © XPB

Hamilton immediately began to redress the balance by nipping back up the inside of Bottas on the first run through The Loop, before Daniel Ricciardo over-optimistically tried to repass Romain Grosjean's Lotus down the inside into the 90-degree Village right-hander that precedes it.

Contact pitched Grosjean into team-mate Pastor Maldonado's car - taking both out of the race (Maldonado limped to the pits first) - while Fernando Alonso half-spun avoiding the incident and wiped out his McLaren team-mate Jenson Button in the process, forcing Alonso to the pits for a new nose.

Following the inevitable safety car period to clean up the mess, Hamilton attempted to complete his recovery to the lead by driving around the outside of Massa into Club.

The reigning world champion locked up and ran off the track briefly, allowing Bottas to retake second before the fast right-hander that leads back onto the start/finish straight.

Williams was running one-two again with racing back under way. The dynamic recalled the Austrian GP of 2014, where Williams capitalised on a poor performance by both Mercedes drivers to lock out the front row of the grid and then lead the early stages of the race.

Back then Williams wasn't really playing to win. The team produced a good 2014 car but endured a poor run of results, and was desperate to convert its speed into a solid podium finish.

It did that by taking third place with Bottas, but the prevailing feeling afterwards was that slightly sharper strategy and better driving around the pitstops might have allowed the team to beat at least one of the Mercs and get both its drivers onto the podium.

Hamilton's first bid to deprive Williams of the lead went awry © XPB

Williams is a better team than it was back then - more confident, sharper operationally, and readjusted to running closer to the front after so long in the doldrums. With both FW37s ahead of the Mercedes here, surely there was at least a chance to genuinely challenge for victory.

The trouble was the leading Williams simply wasn't fast enough in the early stages. Massa was fractionally quicker than Bottas in qualifying (by 0.064 seconds) but he didn't look as comfortable in the early stages of the race, running with full tanks on partly used medium tyres.

Williams told Bottas not to race Massa initially, but Bottas was adamant: "I can do it; I can overtake on the back straight". He couldn't.

The Brazilian repeatedly defended the inside line from his team-mate into Stowe, while Bottas was never quite able to get a sufficient run using DRS to sweep around Massa's outside and take the lead.

This battling allowed Hamilton to remain steadfastly within 1.5s of the lead throughout the remainder of the first stint, while Massa looked to be holding the faster car of Bottas up.

"I did a good pace on the hard [tyre but] I had too much front wing on the medium," explained Massa. "I was trying to hold my position. I was not doing anything wrong.

"Where he was better than me, and was catching me, was on the back straight before corner 15 [Stowe]. But corner 15 is a high-speed corner and I was just going inside the few times he was close enough. He tried to go outside but he was never going to pass me on the outside at that corner.

Bottas was sure he could've pulled away © LAT

"We were fighting, Mercedes was fighting. It shows the drivers need to fight. Valtteri was a little better than me on the option [medium] tyres but I was quicker on the hard tyres. Everything that happened today was definitely correct, part of a normal racing."

Technical chief Pat Symonds spoke about it being "the Williams way" to let both drivers race each other without interference, and for his part Bottas refused to suggest Massa should have let him through.

"That's not racing," Bottas said.

But he did suggest Williams should have allowed him to attack his team-mate sooner, rather than waiting to see how the first part of the race settled down, and how "Mercedes dealt with their position", as Symonds put it.

"It would have been nice to have been able to race when I had the best opportunities, but I wasn't allowed to overtake," said Bottas. "Because we were in very good positions, the team wanted to settle things down, not for us to lose time battling.

"Of course for me it was a disappointing situation, but that's very easy to say afterwards. It was quite clear I had a bit more pace at that point, but this is racing."

Bottas estimated he would have been "around half a second per lap" faster than Massa in the first stint, had he been able/allowed to overtake him at the earliest opportunity.

Massa squeezed out of the pits still just ahead of Rosberg © XPB

It certainly looked as though the Finn had spare pace in hand, for his in-lap was 1.291s faster than Massa's at the end of the first stint.

Assuming he'd got ahead of the Brazilian when he first tried for the lead on lap 10, that would have left nine laps to build an advantage before Hamilton made his first stop.

Based on Bottas's estimate, he would have led by roughly 4.5s before the stops, which should (given Williams pulled off a smooth tyre-change on Bottas's car) have been enough to avoid getting jumped by Hamilton's earlier stop.

That would have meant Williams lying first and third after the pitstops, rather than second and third. Then it would have been down to Bottas to repel Hamilton's charge on the harder tyre.

Ignoring (for now) the fact rain arrived late in the race and shook things up, should Williams have been more ruthless in pursuit of victory during the early dry phase, sacrificing the slower car for the faster one?

"I don't know, you need to ask the team," Bottas replied. "I do respect the team's position, like I did today when I was told not to overtake. I didn't, even though I had the opportunity.

"We need to have a better look at how we could have got the best outcome from today. I won't say any more, but possibly there could have been something we could have done better."

Hamilton was free to pull away once he had leapfrogged the Williams © LAT

Sticking to this 'pure racing' philosophy ultimately meant Hamilton jumped both Williams drivers in the pits easily, leaving the world champion free to race on to victory unchallenged, but Williams performance chief Rob Smedley defended the approach.

"We don't want to favour one driver over the other - absolutely not - it's a team effort and we wanted to get as many points as possible for the team," he explained.

"The team comes before anybody - we have our rules of engagement and they are such that we were happy to let the drivers race as long as they weren't holding each other up."

But it seemed they were holding each other up. At this point in the race it was possible to fight for first and have the other car running third, or fourth at the worst.

If points "for the team" is the aim, then first and third is better than second and third. Even first and fourth is better than second and third.

Ultimately it does seem Williams would have been better off overall if Bottas had been allowed/able to take the lead of this race, but of course Massa won't be cowed easily in this sort of situation, as he proved in Malaysia last year when he ignored a "team instruction" (Claire Williams's words) to let Bottas past during a minor points fight with McLaren.

Regardless, at this stage Williams was at least able to do at Silverstone what it couldn't late on at the Red Bull Ring in 2014 - hold off the second Mercedes around the pitstops.

Bottas rejoined from his stop side-by-side with Massa, but conceded position heading into the Village right-hander. Rosberg spotted his chance and dived inside Bottas at The Loop, but the Finn fought back on the exit and regained third place by driving decisively around the outside line through the Aintree kink.

Keeping Rosberg off the podium would have represented an excellent consolation prize for Williams. But then the rain came.

There were 15 laps to run when the leaders began to suffer, as the section of track that includes Brooklands, Luffield, Woodcote and the old start/finish straight became treacherously wet.

Vettel would ultimately edge Williams off the podium entirely © XPB

It was during this late phase that the race really fell apart for Williams.

The Mercedes seemed much better at retaining tyre temperature on the hard compound as circuit conditions worsened, and Rosberg charged past both Bottas and Massa with relative ease, having not been able to make much of an impression previously.

The German outdragged Bottas on the exit of Copse on lap 39 of 52, before diving inside Massa at Village two laps later.

Two laps after that, race winner Hamilton dived into the pits for intermediate tyres ("for the first time probably in my career I made the perfect choice tyre-wise," he said); and Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel did the same from fifth position.

Williams waited one more lap before changing tyres on both cars in quick succession.

One lap too late, unfortunately. Conditions by this stage were so bad that both Williams drivers' in-laps were around 20s slower than those managed by Hamilton and Vettel. Massa rejoined fourth, behind Vettel.

"We were waiting until the right time to stop and Lewis made a really great decision there," explained Smedley. "We were just trying to watch our sectors, and in fact that middle sector of the lap when he stopped was getting much quicker.

"The rain was just hitting the pit exit area on the pit straight, and when it did hit Vettel probably had 15 seconds more or something to make that decision when it was clearly going to be wet, and our cars were just past the pit entry.

Hamilton's tyre change was perfectly timed © XPB

"Once you're past the pit entry you have to do another lap. It was disappointing that we didn't quite get that."

Nor did Williams get the result such a good start to the race promised. It must be galling to lead the race with both cars but finish a distant fourth and fifth.

In fact, such was Bottas's lack of pace on the intermediate tyre (a problem Williams has suffered in the past) that he came close to losing out to Daniil Kvyat's Red Bull too.

"Of course there's a sense of disappointment," added Smedley. "We come here because we want to win, that's why we all get out of bed in the morning.

"There's a fair degree of pragmatism to that desire, and of course we wanted to get both of our cars on the podium once we got ourselves in a really favourable position.

"There is nothing magic in it; you know Mercedes are sat behind you and they've got a quicker car, and it was going to be awfully difficult to have both of our cars in front of both of theirs.

"We want to come here and race, come here and win, and get both cars on the podium.

"It hasn't happened and so therefore - we are all racers, we are all disappointed."

But thanks to the home hero Hamilton winning, the 140,000 crowd didn't go home sharing that disappointment.