Lewis Hamilton won his 7th title during the Turkish GP, claiming a victory from 6th position on the grid in a rain-hit, extremely challenging race. The victory, and the title meant he equalled the record of seven F1 titles, made by Michael Schumacher. Ross Brawn, who worked at Benetton and Ferrari during the times of Schumacher’s success, said that this race was a clear demonstration of Hamilton’s driving skills, despite the dominance of his team.

As Brawn said in an interview with racefans.net: “Lewis drove a brilliant race. If anyone questions that ‘he’s got the best car, he ought to win’, they ought to watch that race because that was a masterpiece. We (F1) had some very negative comments about the grip levels and the conditions. And we had one of the greatest races of the year. I think everybody took something away from that. It was interesting to me to see the more experienced drivers come to the fore there.”

Brawn also believes that as the race in Turkey has shown, slowing down the cars, which is expected to happen from 2022 due to the new technical regulations can improve the quality of racing. As he said: “That’s another thing that we’ve sort of taken into consideration, that it doesn’t necessarily follow that producing the fastest lap time is going to produce the best race.” 

In addition, as a perspective on the season of 2020, Brawn said this has been the “strongest year ever” for F1, due to the unique spectacles the season has offered. As he said: “That’s something we’re taking into consideration: should we think about a rotation of [venues] to get a little bit more variety? Another popular aspect was the different winners. It wasn’t quite so metronomic, which really gives us encouragement for the future with our ambitions to make for more competitive racing [which is less] dominated by a specific team. We still want it to be a meritocracy – don’t get me wrong – but we want to see different teams succeed. The fact we had more of a range of winners and races really came across very strongly. It was one of our best years in many areas of the measurements we take. In terms of digital [media] it is one of our strongest shares; in fact, our strongest year ever.”