Hamilton Won His Fourth Title With The Worst Ever Championship-Winning Result

The cards were stacked heavily in Lewis Hamilton’s favour to secure his fourth Formula 1 championship this weekend in Mexico. His main rival Sebastian Vettel had to finish in the top two and rely on Hamilton finishing 10th or lower, which looked very unlikely unless something totally crazy happened.

On the first lap, something totally crazy did happen. The pair collided at turn three, giving Hamilton a puncture and breaking Vettel’s front wing. Both had to pit for repairs and dropped to the back, once again handing the advantage to Hamilton, and the race became a question of just how much they could recover.

As Max Verstappen crushed it on the way to his second win of the season, Vettel tried everything to get up to the second place he needed (at minimum) to keep his title hopes alive, but could only get as far a fourth.

That meant Hamilton was champion regardless, but he struggled rather more with his recovery and could only finish ninth. Excluding retirements, that’s the lowest anyone has ever finished to win a world championship, beating Michael Schumacher’s ‘record’ from 2003, where he won the title with an eighth-place finish (Nelson Piquet was ‘classified’ 15th when he won the 1987 championship, but he didn’t actually finish the race).

During the race Hamilton also got lapped, making him the first driver to win a championship whilst being a lap down since James Hunt, way back in 1976. It also put to an end his record of having completed every single lap in the season up to this point.

It may be a pretty low-key way for him to secure a championship, but he probably won’t care. After all, he’s just the fifth driver (joining Vettel, Schumacher, Alain Prost and Juan Manuel Fangio) to have won four or more championships, and he’s also usurped Jackie Stewart as the UK’s most decorated F1 driver.

As ninth-place finishes go, that had to have been the most rewarding.