Racing | Formula 1 | 2019 United States Grand Prix — Hamilton Secures His Sixth Championship at Austin

At Circuit of The Americas on 3 November 2019, Valtteri Bottas started the United States Grand Prix from pole while Mercedes teammate Lewis Hamilton lined up fifth with the Drivers’ Championship almost decided.

Bottas set the pace on a two-stop strategy. Hamilton made one stop and briefly led late in the race, but Bottas passed him for the lead on lap 52 of 56 and completed the 308.405-kilometre distance in 1 hour 33 minutes 55.653 seconds.

Hamilton finished 4.148 seconds behind, with Max Verstappen third at 5.002 seconds. Those were the final podium positions after post-race checks.

Second place gave Hamilton 381 championship points to Bottas’s 314. The 67-point margin exceeded the 52 points still available across the final two races, securing Hamilton’s sixth World Drivers’ Championship and making him, at the time, only the second driver after Michael Schumacher to win six.

The final classification also records Daniil Kvyat’s five-second penalty for causing a last-lap collision with Sergio Pérez, dropping Kvyat from tenth on the road to twelfth and promoting Pérez into the final points position. Pérez had already been ordered to start from the pit lane for ignoring a weighbridge call during practice; neither decision affected the podium or championship.

The race used COTA’s counter-clockwise, 5.513-kilometre, 20-turn Grand Prix configuration. The pin marks the circuit rather than a speculative corner, and the accompanying diagram shows the established course, not the race itself.

Sources: Formula 1, “2019 United States Grand Prix — Race Result” (https://www.formula1.com/en/results/2019/races/1018/united-states/race-result); Formula 1, “Starting Grid” (https://www.formula1.com/en/results/2019/races/1018/united-states/starting-grid); Formula 1, “Hamilton crowned F1 world champion for sixth time as Bottas wins in Austin” (https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article/united-states-grand-prix-2019-race-report-and-highlights.3mSPD2w9Q394Kr00cpmHQx); Motor Sport, “Hamilton denied race win as he claims sixth F1 title” (https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/articles/single-seaters/f1/hamilton-denied-race-win-he-claims-sixth-f1-title-2019-united-states-grand-prix-report/); Circuit of The Americas (https://circuitoftheamericas.com/); Wikimedia Commons file and georeference (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Austin_circuit.svg).

Image: “Austin circuit.svg” by Gustavo Girardelli, CC BY-SA 2.0, incorporating OpenStreetMap data under ODbL, via Wikimedia Commons. The SVG was rendered at 1280 × 1280 pixels on a white background; geometry and labels were not changed.