Did Hamilton have the pace to win Spanish GP?

For after a season where a top five would have been something to be happy about at times, even through complete luck, to get there after charging up from 19th on the road said much about the progress made with the W13.

As team boss Toto Wolff said on Sunday night: “With Lewis, we had probably the fastest race car today. He was 50 seconds behind at the end. And he caught all the way up, and at stages in the race he was the quickest. That shows the potential that the car has.”

Wolff’s tone is bullish enough to prompt some thought about just what would have been possible if Hamilton had had not hit trouble at Turn 4 on lap one when he clashed with Kevin Magnussen.

For having finished the race with roughly the same 50 seconds+ gap that he had at the end of lap one, is there even an argument to suggest that Hamilton could have won?

Let’s dig into the figures.

Hamilton’s tangle with Magnussen and the subsequent puncture meant he had lost touch with the main pack by the end of the opening lap once he had been in the pits.

He resumed in 19th place, about 38.6 seconds behind Nicholas Latifi in front of him and a whopping 53.908 seconds adrift of then race leader Charles Leclerc by the end of lap two.

Having moved off the medium and on to a used soft compound (with Leclerc the only frontrunner with a fresh set), Hamilton did not make much of an impression early on. In fact, clearly with an eye to going as long as he could on the set, he drifted off the front rather than closed in.

He was more than one minute back by the end of lap eight, and by the time he came in for his second stop at the end of lap 22, he was a full 1min 07s behind Leclerc.

After the switch to mediums, Hamilton’s gap to Leclerc stabilised at around the 1m16s region before his Ferrari rival’s power unit failure changed the game at the front of the pack.

When Mercedes teammate George Russell took the…