Hamilton wins in Barcelona: What Hamilton, Bottas and Vettel said after GP

Lewis Hamilton led Valtteri Bottas to the fifth consecutive Mercedes one-two at the start of this season after dominating the Spanish Grand Pr The Briton took an extra point for the fastest lap of the race, his first of the campaign and was helped by a safety car deployment 20 laps from the end giving him a free second pitstop. The 76th victory of the five times world champion's career, and third of the season, sent the Hamilton seven points clear of Finnish team mate Valtteri Bottas after five of the 21 races. "This is history in the making to have five one-twos," said Hamilton. "I'm very proud to be a part of that and proud of everyone's hard work." Bottas held on to the second place after a slight correction and Verstappen swept through from fourth on the grid to third. "It was pretty tight but I lost it at the start, there was some strange behaviour on the clutch -- it was like biting, releasing, biting, releasing and I've not felt that before," said Bottas. "As a team it's incredible, the fifth one-two in a row is really good. I got some good points, every single point is going to count this year, so that's good for sure but I'm just keen to find out why the start was so bad." Both Vettel and Leclerc also made comparatively slow first pitstops. “I think I had a shot at the podium but obviously, in turn, one with the flat spot in the first stint compromised by own race,” Vettel said in Barcelona. “But I wanted to try something to mix things up. I knew that I won’t win the race in turn one but at least I thought we can mix things up with Mercedes and then have a bit more of a fight with everybody. Charles was on a different strategy and with the Safety Car obviously his strategy was thrown to bits. But I think we tried to work together as much as we can but obviously every time we try to do something there’s a lot of talk afterwards which maybe doesn’t help to be a bit more reactive on the fly.”

Lewis Hamilton insists Valterri Bottas’s success is down to his former mechanic