Hamilton starts at 14 and wins the German Grand Prix [+video]

In a race which was destined for Ferrari to win especially for Sebastian Vettel racing in his home track, a place which is just a few kilometres from where he grew up turned into a disaster. When Vettel emerged as the pole sitter of the race, a tired Lewis Hamilton who had a horrible qualifying looked like he needed to pull a rabbit out of his hat of tricks to get a good position. Lo and behold, the British racer did just that, a miracle of sorts to start from 14th place and end up as the winner of the 2018 German Grand Prix.

The race started as one would expect, Vettel was ahead of Bottas, Raikkonen and Verstappen as they cleared turn 1. In fact, everyone was rather polite with the whole pack clearing turn after turn with no incident. This allowed Lewis Hamilton to slowly climb up the pack as Vettel tries to hold Bottas off. Ferrari then decided to do a bit of a strategic play by switching the tyres of their cars from ultra-soft to soft tyres and even with the pits, Raikkonen emerged from the pits just ahead of Hamilton who have already climbed up the ranks.

Due to Raikkonen having fresher tyres and catching up ahead to Vettel, Ferrari instructed Vettel to give way to the Finn. It was at this time when Mercedes decided to finally pit Hamilton and giving him the fastest ultrasoft tyres, a play in order to get him to catch up to the leaders. Just as Hamilton swapped tyres, rain started to pour which led to several teams anticipating a wet track hence swapping out their tyres for intermediates.

Thanks to the slight rain, it caused the track to be slippery which then led to Vettel understeering and crashing his car. It was one of the rare moments in which where Vettel was leading and crashed out. This allowed Hamilton to take over the lead and take home the German Grand Prix win.

Here are the final standings:

POS	NO	DRIVER	CAR	LAPS	TIME/RETIRED	PTS
1	44	Lewis Hamilton	MERCEDES	67	1:32:29.845	25
2	77	Valtteri Bottas	MERCEDES	67	+4.535s	18
3	7	Kimi Räikkönen	FERRARI	67	+6.732s	15
4	33	Max Verstappen	RED BULL RACING TAG HEUER	67	+7.654s	12
5	27	Nico Hulkenberg	RENAULT	67	+26.609s	10
6	8	Romain Grosjean	HAAS FERRARI	67	+28.871s	8
7	11	Sergio Perez	FORCE INDIA MERCEDES	67	+30.556s	6
8	31	Esteban Ocon	FORCE INDIA MERCEDES	67	+31.750s	4
9	9	Marcus Ericsson	SAUBER FERRARI	67	+32.362s	2
10	28	Brendon Hartley	SCUDERIA TORO ROSSO HONDA	67	+34.197s	1
11	20	Kevin Magnussen	HAAS FERRARI	67	+34.919s	0
12	55	Carlos Sainz	RENAULT	67	+43.069s	0
13	2	Stoffel Vandoorne	MCLAREN RENAULT	67	+46.617s	0
14	10	Pierre Gasly	SCUDERIA TORO ROSSO HONDA	66	+1 lap	0
15	16	Charles Leclerc	SAUBER FERRARI	66	+1 lap	0
16	14	Fernando Alonso	MCLAREN RENAULT	65	DNF	0
NC	18	Lance Stroll	WILLIAMS MERCEDES	53	DNF	0
NC	5	Sebastian Vettel	FERRARI	51	DNF	0
NC	35	Sergey Sirotkin	WILLIAMS MERCEDES	51	DNF	0
NC	3	Daniel Ricciardo	RED BULL RACING TAG HEUER	27	DNF	0