SAO PAULO, Brazil — Mercedes driver Valtteri Bottas claimed the pole for Sunday’s Sao Paulo Grand Prix by winning Saturday afternoon’s Sprint race.
Bottas, starting second on soft tires, began with a huge launch off the line to pry the lead off medium-shod Max Verstappen, who went wide in the opening lap but rescued second by re-passing Carlos Sainz soon afterward.
As those soft tires began to drop off, Verstappen closed in on Bottas but ended up 1.1 seconds behind at the checkered flag. Sainz held off Red Bull driver Sergio Perez for third.
“Today, the start was the key thing for me and I got a good one! We gambled a little bit with the soft tire,” Bottas said. “We knew that it would be a benefit for the start and it worked and it was all about trying to survive until the end. It was quite tricky in the final laps but Max still struggled to follow in the corners, so I’m glad it worked out perfectly. The support here from the fans has been amazing here, so thank you as well to everybody who came out today.”
There was plenty of drama well before the Sao Paulo Sprint with Verstappend fined 50,000 pounds for touching Hamilton’s car on the grid. Meanwhile, Hamilton was disqualified from qualifying and forced to start the Sprint race from the rear of the field.
Point leader Verstappen was pleased with finishing second on Saturday.
“We started on the harder compound and as soon as I saw Valtteri was on the softs I knew it would be quite tricky to keep position, especially in these colder track temperatures,” Verstappen said. “After the first lap we had good pace but it’s hard to overtake here and the tires overheat a lot so there’s not much you can do so I ended up sitting behind. At the end of the day I always try to do the best I can and it was good to score a few points today.
“Tomorrow is the important day and it will be different when we have more options with pit strategies. Let’s see what happens tomorrow, it’s going to be quite a bit warmer so hopefully that will be better for us but it’s difficult to say at the moment.”
Hamilton charged back through the field to finish fifth.
“Honestly, I had no idea what was possible today – I didn’t set a limit or a maximum,” Hamilton said. “When I was at the back of the grid at the start before we pulled away for the formation lap, I think I might have been able to see like, 10 and I was like ‘okay, that’s my goal, I’ve got to try and get up as far as possible’ but then all of a sudden I was chipping away at it much faster and I really used a lot of different things for motivation today. I just never give up, you can’t ever give up.”