Nico Rosberg has clawed back ground in the fight for the Formula 1 World Championship title with a commanding victory in the Spanish Grand Prix, as Lewis Hamilton trailed in second place after being cornered into an alternative tyre strategy.
Starting from his first pole position of the season, Rosberg made no mistake from the lights to take the lead from the opening bends, but Hamilton would get away more sluggishly, allowing Vettel to nose ahead into the first corner and hold position in second during the early laps.
It would ultimately prove to be the defining moment of the race for the championship leader as he spent the first two stints bottled up behind Vettel – not helped by a clumsy first stop -, forcing Mercedes to design an alternative strategy to help him get the jump over his rival.
Gambling on a three-stop strategy, with a lengthy middle stint on the hard tyre, the risk paid off as Hamilton successfully returned to the track ahead of the Ferrari when he made his final stop, but it wasn’t good enough to make a convincing impression on Rosberg’s healthy accumulated advantage.
His first win since the 2014 Brazilian Grand Prix – and a timely triumph for his title dreams having not out-scored his Mercedes team-mate all season -, the result sees Rosberg close the gap to Hamilton in the standings to 20 points.
Having played a rear-guard action to Hamilton for much of the race before losing out in the pit-stops, Vettel nonetheless returned to the podium by a large margin in third place to maintain his interest in the title battle, albeit now 31 points adrift of the leader.
He would finish ahead of Valtteri Bottas, who successfully resisted a hard-charging Kimi Raikkonen in the final laps to secure a fourth place finish. The former champion made an aggressive getaway to quickly work his way up to fifth place from seventh on the grid, but an attempt to replicate his option-prime-option tyre strategy from Bahrain to come on strong in the closing stages would fall just short of its target.
Having started down in ninth place, Felipe Massa successfully made up ground but couldn’t stick with Raikkonen as he finished as the last remaining driver not to be lapped by the dominant Rosberg.
With the Renault-powered cars left embarrassingly vulnerable down the home straight once DRS had kicked in, neither Toro Rosso or Red Bull could hope of holding their qualifying advantage over their Ferrari and Mercedes-powered rivals as they battled for the last remaining top ten positions.
In the end, experience would win out as Daniel Ricciardo maintained his status as ‘best of the rest’ behind the top three teams with a fairly untroubled route to seventh. It was a race experience that differed to Romain Grosjean’s eventful afternoon, the Frenchman ruining Pastor Maldonado’s race when he clipped his team-mate early on and damaged his rear-wing, before striking his jack-man in the pit-stop to send him into a dramatic – but thankfully inconsequential – lunge backwards. Despite this, he would recover to eighth for his and Lotus’ third points’ finish in a row.
Completing the points’ paying positions, Carlos Sainz engaged in a dramatic final lap tussle with Red Bull stablemate Daniil Kvyat in the fight for ninth, the pair making contact as they turned into the first corner. Despite running wide, it was Sainz that would be classified as having made the move stick ahead of the Russian, though the clash is now under investigation.
Sainz’s pass at the end aside, it was nonetheless an unrewarding day for the Toro Rosso team following its third row heroics in qualifying, with Max Verstappen missing out on the points in 11th.
As expected, Sauber and Force India’s hope of points didn’t materialise in a race of low attrition, Felipe Nasr, Sergio Perez, Marcus Ericsson and Nico Hulkenberg distant in 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th.
Still, the teams fared better than McLaren-Honda, whose hopes of challenging for its first points ended when Jenson Button laboured towards the back of the field for the entirety of the race, while Fernando Alonso – who briefly got up to seventh place as he ran long on the first stint – retired with brake issues after also almost striking his jack man when entering the pit lane.