Hamilton, Rosberg and the Last-Corner Collision That Handed Verstappen His Second Win

The 2016 Austrian Grand Prix was a race that the top two drivers in the championship appeared to be controlling comfortably until they destroyed each other's afternoon in a single corner on the penultimate lap. Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton, locked in the closest championship fight of the Mercedes era, had been running first and second for much of the race. What the Red Bull Ring delivered in its final stages was a collision that resolved nothing in the title battle and everything about who was going to win that afternoon.

Hamilton was closing on Rosberg in the final laps, the gap shrinking as his tyres found form. Going into Turn 3 on lap 70, Hamilton attempted to pass Rosberg on the inside. Rosberg, defending his position, did not fully leave room. Hamilton's front wing made contact with Rosberg's rear tyre. The impact damaged Rosberg's car significantly — a puncture or suspension issue that dropped him rapidly back through the field. Hamilton, too, took damage, his front wing compromised and his pace reduced.

Behind them, Max Verstappen had been running a clean, controlled race in the Red Bull. When the two Mercedes came together and their pace evaporated, he found himself at the front of a race he had not been leading moments before. He held the position through the final corners and crossed the line first — his second Formula 1 victory, following his extraordinary debut win for Red Bull at Barcelona six weeks earlier.

At 18 years and 227 days, Verstappen was the youngest race winner in the sport's history — a record he had already set in Spain. The Red Bull Ring, which bore his team's name on its ownership boards, provided him with a victory in front of a crowd that had been cheering him throughout. The scenes afterwards — Verstappen on the top step, orange-clad Dutch fans swarming the podium — felt like a preview of something that would define the sport's next decade.

Max Verstappen won the Austrian Grand Prix for Red Bull-TAG Heuer, his second victory in Formula 1. Lewis Hamilton finished second despite his damaged car, Kimi Räikkönen third for Ferrari. Nico Rosberg, who had been leading until the collision, finished fourth — a result that damaged his championship advantage but did not eliminate it.

The Mercedes stewards investigated the collision between Hamilton and Rosberg and found no driver primarily at fault. Both received reprimands. The championship continued as it had been: tight, contested, occasionally physical. Rosberg won the title at the season's final race in Abu Dhabi and retired five days later.

The 2016 Austrian Grand Prix outcome — Verstappen winning, Rosberg and Hamilton taking damage — was a microcosm of the year's pattern. The two Mercedes drivers seemed at times to be their own greatest obstacle, their mutual competitiveness finding expression in incidents that benefited neither of them. Rosberg's championship was built on consistency rather than pace supremacy; he finished on the podium more often than Hamilton when things went wrong, and things went wrong often in 2016.

Verstappen's second victory, coming so quickly after his first, confirmed that his Barcelona win was not a statistical accident. He was, at 18, already producing race-winning performances in a car that was not always the fastest. The trajectory was clear. What followed — three consecutive championships between 2021 and 2023 — was its fulfilment.

The Austrian Grand Prix of July 3, 2016 took place ten days after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in the Brexit referendum of June 23. The Leave vote — 52% to 48% — had produced a political earthquake whose aftershocks were still reverberating: Prime Minister David Cameron had resigned the morning after the result, the pound had fallen sharply, and the political parties of both sides were in various stages of shock and recrimination.

Among Formula 1's paddock, which is among the most internationally staffed workplaces in professional sport, Brexit was discussed with particular intensity. The sport's economic model depended on the free movement of personnel and equipment across European borders. The implications were not yet clear but the concerns were genuine. The race at Spielberg — in a country that had voted to remain within the European project that Britain had just rejected — took place in a paddock that was reckoning, quietly, with what had just changed.

Warm and sunny at the Red Bull Ring, the Styrian hills providing a spectacular backdrop in the early-July sunshine. Temperatures around 28°C, the circuit dry throughout. The conditions were ideal for racing and offered no excuse to either Hamilton or Rosberg for the contact that defined their afternoon. The mountain air was clear; the corner was visible; the collision was entirely a product of racing aggression untempered by caution.