How Hamilton dominated Rosberg

The 2016 British Grand Prix couldn't really have gone any better for Lewis Hamilton. After all the travails of the early part of his campaign - the unreliable car, the haemorrhaging of points to chief rival Nico Rosberg, the tension within the Mercedes Formula 1 team caused by repeated collisions with his team-mate - now it must finally feel as though the tide of this season has turned.

Hamilton was in sublime form at Silverstone - topping every session before achieving the crowning glory of a fourth British GP victory, tying him with Nigel Mansell on the race's all-time winners' list, behind only Jim Clark and Alain Prost.

This landmark achievement also slashed Hamilton's deficit to Rosberg in the world championship battle to just one point, once the stewards decided to impose a time penalty for a radio rules transgression that demoted Rosberg to third in the results.

There was a time not so long ago when Rosberg's hold on this title race seemed vice-like; now it increasingly looks as though his hands are smeared with butter...

For Hamilton, this was the sort of weekend racing drivers dream about - finding a higher plain of personal performance from which you simply cannot be budged, no matter what your rivals throw at you.

"It's so easy to come into this weekend with the wrong energy, whether it be nerves or listening to the negativity that surrounds, but to come in feeling fresh, feeling powerful, feeling strong and confident - and deliver - is what you hope for," Hamilton said.

"That rough patch I was going through in terms of reliability, that was definitely hard to handle when you want to win a world championship as much as I want to win the world championship.

"I really feel that since that low after Barcelona I was able to cultivate a very, very positive and strong mental attitude."

Beyond his zen-like state of mind, the key to Hamilton's domination of Rosberg was a significant edge in driving through Silverstone's high-speed sweeps.

Throughout Saturday's qualifying session - where Hamilton bested Rosberg by more than three tenths of a second to take pole - Hamilton was significantly quicker through sector two, which features the majority of the fastest corners of the lap.

Copse, Maggotts, Becketts, Chapel. This is where Hamilton appeared to be doing the majority of his damage.

"That sector is the best sector in the whole season for me," explained Hamilton, who joked that "bigger balls" were the real key to his edge.

"That combination of corners is phenomenal, particularly after Copse. It's an unbelievable set of corners when you get the car right, and when you know where to place the car.

"It's the greatest. And I was able to hit that pretty much whenever I needed, pretty much every lap."

Perhaps there was also a technical difference between the two Mercedes drivers - some particular reason why Hamilton had things more hooked up through this part of the track than Rosberg?

"This is a circuit where confidence is king," explained Mercedes technical chief Paddy Lowe. "If you have the confidence to push harder you find more and more laptime.

"Corners like Copse and Stowe, the quicker you go, the more downforce you've got, the quicker you can go.

"We didn't expect either car to get into the 1m29s [in qualifying] - and Lewis did two low-1m29s.

"Lewis was really dialled in and just got it nailed. Nico was good enough to acknowledge Lewis just had the edge."

Hamilton's confidence was in evidence from the start of the race. Well, from lap six actually - once officials deemed the circuit dry enough to begin racing properly, after five frustrating tours spent behind the safety car.

Hamilton pulled nearly four seconds on Rosberg over that first proper racing lap, helped by smartly backing up the pack on Hangar Straight then bolting through Stowe, Vale and Club for the safety car restart.

After both Mercedes had completed pitstops for intermediates at the end of lap seven (another indication that the safety car stayed out for too long), Rosberg trailed Hamilton by almost five seconds.

Rosberg was roundly (and rightly) criticised for a particularly weak performance in the wet in Monaco in May, when Mercedes told him to let Hamilton past such was his lack of pace.

Relative to Hamilton he was actually much better here, some laps actually faster than his main rival.

The trouble was Red Bull's Max Verstappen was busy executing a star turn of his own that made Rosberg look a bit second rate in the mixed conditions.

The Spanish Grand Prix winner hunted the Mercedes down and had a brief look inside the W07 at Woodcote, before simply driving around the outside of Rosberg at the final part of Becketts to steal second place away from his rival, who had put two wheels on the wet line through the second part while under pressure from the Red Bull.

"On the intermediates we had good pace, but in the beginning I couldn't really keep up because I couldn't see where I was going!" Verstappen explained.

"Once that cleared a bit I could push. I got past Nico around the outside - the car had a lot of grip so you can make that move."

Hamilton and Rosberg then dived for the pits to switch to slicks on lap 17 of 52, with Verstappen following suit at the end of the following lap. When this shook out Hamilton led Verstappen by seven seconds, with Rosberg a further four behind.

Verstappen slashed the gap to Hamilton to less than six seconds, but then went off at Abbey after catching some lingering water on the approach to the high-speed right-hander.

This caught out many drivers (including Hamilton) as the conditions transitioned from wet to dry, and helped Rosberg home back in on the Red Bull.

"I had a few moments," said Verstappen. "It's very difficult because when everybody touched the water, the spray went to the left and came onto the normal racing line.

"You approach it exactly the same way, but suddenly you pick up a little bit of water on the tyre and you just slide off."

By the end of lap 30 Rosberg was within DRS range of Verstappen, after the teenager almost lost control while lapping Esteban Gutierrez's Haas at the Club chicane.

"The blue flags are ridiculous!" bemoaned Verstappen on team radio, as Rosberg began using the W07's superior speed in the dry to attack repeatedly into Stowe.

Here Verstappen displayed some superb defensive driving, taking a different line to Rosberg through Luffield to get a cleaner exit onto the old start/finish straight, and also trying to ensure he had maximum ERS deployment on Hangar Straight to combat Rosberg's DRS-assisted Mercedes power advantage on the run into Stowe.

"His racecraft is spectacular," said Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff of Verstappen. "The way he positions the car, you can see that if he has a good car underneath him he is able to put up a great fight."

After several failed attempts, Rosberg eventually swept around Verstappen's outside at Stowe on lap 38 to take back second place.

"It was a great battle against him," reckoned Rosberg. "I was playing around with ERS deployment, trying to get him to empty his battery so I could have a good shot.

"But when his was empty mine was empty too, so that didn't work! At times I was doubting - 'am I going to make this happen or not?' He was on the edge, massively on the limit, but it was cool. And it worked out really well in the end."

Verstappen was on brilliant form all weekend, beating team-mate Daniel Ricciardo in qualifying for the first time and getting among the Mercedes battle in a car that can only really challenge in wet or mixed conditions on a classic circuit such as this.

"The chassis becomes a more predominant factor in those conditions," reckoned Red Bull boss Christian Horner. "The straights become shorter and the corners longer.

"We have seen so many times, when it is wet or damp, the car is very strong. We're just crying out for a wet race really."

Upon losing second place, one briefly wondered whether Red Bull might roll the dice and switch Verstappen onto a new set of tyres to apply some strategic pressure to Mercedes.

Pirelli advised that the medium tyre should not ideally be run longer than 28 laps, so the race was just reaching the window for another pitstop.

Felipe Massa, Fernando Alonso and Kevin Magnussen all took the plunge, but with Ricciardo cut adrift in fourth there was no option for Red Bull to split strategies effectively, and in any case Mercedes felt it had enough pace in hand to cover all eventualities.

Freed from dancing to Verstappen's defensive tune, Rosberg began closing down Hamilton, narrowing the gap over six laps - from 8.786s to 6.105s by the end of lap 44, and setting the fastest lap of the race in the process.

Hamilton responded with a personal best lap of his own next time around, to warn Rosberg off suddenly getting any wise ideas about stealing this race away.

But the prospect of a showdown was obliterated entirely when Rosberg suddenly ran into gearbox trouble with seven laps to run.

Mercedes told Rosberg to switch to "default one" (which sounded like some kind of ctrl-alt-delete command) and to "avoid seventh gear".

Unclear as to exactly what this implied, Rosberg asked for clarification as to whether he should "shift through it" and was told "A-firm Nico" by his engineer.

After a couple of troublesome laps Rosberg was able to make sufficient adjustments to lap faster than Verstappen over three of the final four laps of the race, and therefore cling on to second place.

That was until officials decided Mercedes had breached rules designed to prevent teams using radio messages to help their drivers drive their cars, imposing a 10s time penalty that dropped Rosberg back behind Verstappen in the final classification.

Mercedes lodged a notice of intention to appeal against the decision, clearly feeling its messages were within the scope of rules that allow communication concerning components that are in imminent danger of failing.

"It was a very critical problem," said Rosberg. "I was stuck in seventh gear and I was about to stop on track, so they told me 'change default' and try and fix it."

Whether or not Mercedes follows through with its intent to appeal and is subsequently successful (at the time of writing these are both unknown), the difference it will make to the championship fight is merely a matter of three points.

More crucial perhaps is the momentum Hamilton has built by winning four of the past five races.

"The last race and this race I feel I've been firing on all cylinders," added Hamilton, who Wolff felt was simply "unstoppable" at Silverstone.

"I was very comfortable at the front, watching the times from the guys behind. I did everything I could in the race to save the engine. I knew I had a good buffer to the cars behind to I didn't have to lean on it.

"The car was great this weekend - set-up-wise, balance-wise and it was a dream to drive.

"My engineers did a fantastic job. I just felt under control in all those conditions. No problems.

"It was everything that I, as a racing driver, wanted."

And the result was everything the partisan home crowd wanted too - a third successive Hamilton victory at the British Grand Prix, which Hamilton celebrated with a bit of impromptu crowd surfing after the podium ceremony.

It was his way of acknowledging the final piece of jigsaw that defined just how he was able to produce such a dominant display.

They call it the 12th man in football - the power of the crowd's support. Hamilton utilised it to devastating effect to strike his biggest blow yet to Rosberg's floundering title ambitions.

Every year they expect, and once again Hamilton delivered emphatically.