Leclerc now looked locked in for victory, but there was great doubt over second place.<\/p>\n
Hamilton, who earlier had a five-second penalty for moving before the lights went out at the start, was 20 seconds back from his team-mate, but Verstappen was closing in and Russell was going with the Dutchman, having dropped back with a pit stop on lap 34 forced by a slow puncture.<\/p>\n
But on lap 48, Verstappen spun off at Stowe, his radio message in which he swore about the car suggesting it was a mistake from the driver created by difficult handling.<\/p>\n
That brought out the safety car, and initially it looked as if there would be a short blast to the finish with the Ferrari drivers contesting victory on fresh tyres.<\/p>\n
But Russell did not pit, so he would have taken any restart between them, which would have delayed Hamilton’s charge, even by a few seconds.<\/p>\n
But Verstappen had crashed with only four laps to go, and there was doubt about whether the incident would be cleared in time.<\/p>\n
As the cars came around to approach the start of the final lap, the timing screen initially said the safety car would pull in, but a few seconds later that message was replaced by another saying it would stay out.<\/p>\n
The full post-race FIA statement said: “The safety-car period regulation states that one lap must be completed following the unlapping procedure.<\/p>\n
“This process was followed by race operations. The ‘safety car in this lap’ message was displayed erroneously due to a software error.”<\/p>\n
The safety-car finish guaranteed Leclerc’s first win since the 2024 US Grand Prix in Austin.<\/p>\n
Russell’s podium was his first at his home race, while Lando Norris took fourth for McLaren after a solid but quiet race as the world champions wait for upgrades due at the Hungarian Grand Prix this month.<\/p>\n
Red Bull’s Isack Hadjar was fifth, followed by the Racing Bulls of Liam Lawson and 18-year-old British rookie Arvid Lindblad.<\/p>\n
Norris’ team-mate Oscar Piastri dropped to the back after being involved in a first-lap incident and recovered to 11th, behind the Audi of Gabriel Bortoleto and Alpine’s Franco Colapinto and Pierre Gasly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Leclerc now looked locked in for victory, but there was great doubt over second place. Hamilton, who earlier…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":675350,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-675349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675349\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/675350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}