F1: With Mercedes dominant and 20 races Hamilton can break record
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The 2015 Formula One season might only be one race old, but judging by the way things shaped up in Australia the ground looks fertile for Lewis Hamilton to surpass the current record of Grand Prix wins in a single campaign.
Just as his Mercedes team had done all of last season, the British world champion dominated the race weekend at Melbourne’s Albert Park, starting from pole before cruising to victory as only 11 drivers completed a somewhat farcical curtain raiser.
Unsurprisingly, the only challenge to Hamilton’s track supremacy came courtesy of teammate Nico Rosberg, though the Briton’s ability to maintain a two-second gap in the final part of the race echoed his Championship win in 2014.
Even at the earliest of junctures the 4/1 on offer from Ladbrokes that Hamilton can break the 13-wins mark held jointly by Michael Schumacher from his glory days at Ferrari and latterly Sebastian Vettel at Red Bull in 2013, looks peachy.
For starters Schumacher’s 2004 marker was achieved from two less races than the 20 now in the calendar for 2015 thanks to the addition of the Mexican Grand Prix, while Vettel availed his 13 victories from 19 starts.
The Ferrari and Red Bull cars of those eras enjoyed a similar stranglehold over the competition in terms of speed and reliability to what Mercedes do now, although looking at the timesheets from Australia the gap has potentially never been bigger.
Hamilton’s Silver Arrow finished 34 seconds ahead of Vettel’s Ferrari, while six of the 11 to actually complete the race were lapped.
It is early days, but armed with such a machine Hamilton’s 11 race victories of last season looks the perfect building block to overhauling the German duo in the record books.
All Odds and Markets are correct as of the date of publishing.
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