Lap 50 out of 52. Valtteri Bottas severe a puncture: earlier some laps he warned team about vibrations coming from the tyres, not caused by a flat spot.

LAP 50/52

Disaster for Bottas as he's forced to limp back to the pits from P2 with damage to his wheel

He emerges all the way down in P12!#BritishGP 🇬🇧 #F1 pic.twitter.com/PwgYFUfVxR

— Formula 1 (@F1) August 2, 2020

Immediately the thoughts were off to the reigning car in front: Lewis Hamilton could have lost his seventh victory at the home circuit, one of the most brilliant records for a British driver.

And then at the very last lap the drama: car 44 is kept by cameras with the same front left tyre clearly delaminated: Verstappen is coming closer and closer with almost 50% of the track still to cover.

Lewis Hamilton put on a remarkable show in Q3, storming to pole with a record-breaking laptime at Silverstone. Mercedes secures yet another front row lockout ahead of Verstappen and Leclerc.

Only a fistful of seconds separates the two on the chequered flag; Lewis admits to Coulthard at the race interview to have nearly had a heart attack:

Did that just happen... 🤯

The wildest ending to a #BritishGP ever?? pic.twitter.com/GVj7BGMPt0

— Mercedes-AMG F1 (@MercedesAMGF1) August 2, 2020

Up until that last lap, everything was relatively smooth sailing. The tyres felt great. Valtteri was really pushing incredibly hard, and I was doing some management of that tyre and he looked like he wasn't doing any. Those last few laps, I started to back off and then down the straight, it just deflated. That was definitely a heart-in-the-mouth kind of feeling, because I wasn't quite sure if it had gone down until I hit the brakes, and you could see the tyre was falling off the rim. I nearly didn't get around the last two corners, but thank God we did. I think ultimately maybe we should have stopped towards the end once we saw the delaminations. You may or may not be surprised, but I was really chilled for some reason at the end. Bono was giving me the the information of the gap. I got to the corner, a lot of understeer and I heard him go '9, 8, 7' - and I was like, just get back on the power and try to get the thing to turn. I've definitely never experienced anything like that on the last lap. And my heart probably nearly stopped. I think that's probably how cool I was, because my heart nearly stopped.