Mercedes F1 sides with Hamilton, admitting their mistake in choosing soft tires, which compromised their race strategy.
As we reported yesterday, Lewis Hamilton disclosed his struggle with Mercedes F1 over not starting on soft tires. The team insisted on it, and James Allison, the technical director, acknowledges it was a mistake.
“We should not have started on soft tires; it was an error,” admitted Allison. “If we could go back, we would do what others did and choose the mediums.”
The engineer admits, however, that the team did not anticipate the soft tires underperforming: “The reasoning was that the soft tire often allows you to break away sharply at the start and gives you a good chance of gaining one or two places in the early laps of the race.”
“And we really did not expect, before the race, to face the kind of difficulties we experienced with the soft tires. We thought the soft compound would allow us to gain one or two positions. That was not the case, as the start did not go as planned.”
“We also hoped that the downside of the soft compound, which is a bit more fragile, would not manifest too badly, because if you look at past years in Singapore, overall, the pace starts very, very gently at the Singapore race and drivers then pick up the pace over many laps, which leaves a soft tire quite adequate to run relatively far into the refueling window.”
“We didn’t gain any positions at the start, and the pace began to pick up from the fifth lap. And Lewis was left with a car that wasn’t particularly happy anyway, suffering from quite low tire degradation and having to pit early as a result, which really spoiled his race. So, it was a clear mistake.”
Mercedes had hoped for a free pit stop to switch to medium tires later in the race: “It was a formidable weapon. If there had been a safety car at an opportune moment in the race, that would have been one of the advantages of this strategy.”
“But once we committed to the soft-hard strategy, we considered moving to a two-stop strategy for Lewis at various points in the race. But even though it would have put him on fresher rubber and he would have been faster on these fresher tires, all our calculations suggested that he would not have been able to make up for the loss incurred by the pit stops.”
“All our calculations suggested he would not have recovered the loss related to the pit stops. We could have used it, which would have been a good thing during a safety car. But in a normal, uninterrupted race, which we had in Singapore for the first time in ages, this tire wouldn’t have helped Lewis this weekend.”
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Hamilton’s Soft Tire Strategy: A Mercedes Misstep Hamilton’s Soft Tire Strategy: A Mercedes Misstep
