Toto Wolff has claimed that the racing gods were on his and Mercedes side on Sunday night, as Lewis Hamilton managed to hold off Max Verstappen to win the 2021 Bahrain Grand Prix. Throughout practice and qualifying Red Bull appeared to have the measure of the seven-time constructor world champions, but Lewis Hamilton expertly preserved his tyres to help seal a famous win - his first in a season opener for five years. "If somebody would have told me that this is going to be the result on Sunday I would have probably not believed it, but we recovered well from the test," Wolff told RacingNews365.com and other members of the media. "We are still lacking pace in qualifying and quite a bit and today I think we were competitive. We were definitely competitive and the strategy made all the difference, we took a bold move at the beginning to gain track position, and then at the end the racing god was on our side." Mercedes begin an F1 season as underdogs for the first time in the hybrid era in 2021, as Wolff is never keen to out. Given when the team is relative to Red Bull, the Austrian knows that the Silver Arrows will have to be smart to come out on top on race day moving forwards. "I have no doubt that they [Red Bull] are extremely difficult to beat. They are the ones that are leading the pack," Wolff concluded. "It's not that we have found suddenly some awesome performance, but today was a combination of great strategy, a solid race car, and then just being on the side of fortune."
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