Mercedes admits on wrong choice of strategy for Lewis Hamilton in F1 Singapore GP, as it praises George Russell for holding up Charles Leclerc in the end.
There were couple of drivers who started the F1 Singapore GP on the soft compound, but the major player to do so was Hamilton after Mercedes decided to go with the strategy having looked at the historical data. He started from third and challenged Max Verstappen briefly but that was it for his day.
With no one the soft tyre around and the medium tyre doing well enough, it was more or less game over for Hamilton, who tried to hang on to third ahead of a slightly faster Russell and the Ferrari pair. Eventually, he was forced to pit early on degrading tyres.
They couldn’t even switch to medium tyres, which would have forced him on a 2-stop. They had to use the hard compound to see-through the grand prix, as he not only lost to Russell but also Charles Leclerc in the end. He managed to stay ahead of Carlos Sainz, though.
Mercedes made a mistake as they accepted in their post-race analysis. “Before I give the explanation, I’ll just start off by saying we shouldn’t have started on the Softs,” said James Allison. “That was a mistake. If we could turn back time, we would do what those around us did and select the Mediums.
“The reasoning was that the soft tyre very often allows you to get away from the start abruptly and allows you a good chance of jumping a place or two in the opening laps of the race. We had no real expectation before the race that we were going to suffer the sort of difficulties that we then experienced on the Soft rubber.
“So, we imagined we would get the upside of the Soft rubber, of getting a place or two. We didn’t, because that just isn’t the way the starts played out. And then we hoped that the downside of the Soft being a bit more fragile wouldn’t really play out particularly badly because on the whole, if you look back over the years in Singapore, on the whole the pace starts very, very easy at a Singapore race and the drivers then build up the pace over many, many laps, leaving a Soft tyre perfectly okay to run relatively deep into the pit window.
“So, we didn’t get the places at the start, the pace started building up from around about lap five and that left Lewis with a car that was not particularly happy anyway, suffering from quite poor tyre degradation and needing to come in early as a consequence and really ruined his race for him. Yeah, so just a clear mistake.
“It [medium for second stint] was considered, it was certainly there as a great weapon had there been a safety car at an opportune moment in the race, that would have been one of the upsides of that strategy but once embarked upon the Soft-Hard strategy, we were considering changing to a two-stop for Lewis at various points during the race.
“But, although that would have put him out on fresher rubber and he would have been swift on that fresher rubber, all our calculations suggested that he would not actually have gained back the pit stop loss. So it was there in the hutch, could have used it, would have been good at a safety car but in a normal uninterrupted race, which for the first time in forever we got in Singapore, that tyre was not a thing that would have helped Lewis’ weekend,” summed up Allison, as Hamilton did bring that topic during his visit to Petronas office in Malaysia to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
“We sat in our meeting in the morning of the race, actually the night before they already mentioned that they would like to split the cars,” said Hamilton at the event. “And for me, I was a bit perplexed by it. Because in the past, when we’ve ever been in that position. Normally if George has qualified well like he normally does and I’m out of the Top 10 or something, then we’ll split the strategies, but when we were so close, it didn’t make sense to me.
“So I battled as hard as I could to fight to go on the medium tyre, but the team continued to suggest that I started on the soft. And then when they took the tyre blankets off, everyone was on mediums. I was so angry, so already from that moment I’m frustrated. And then I tried my best to keep up with the guys ahead.
“They were too fast. And then I just tried to make that tyre last as long as could and I had to stop on Lap 17. I knew from that moment, then the race was done for me, because the hard tyre was going to be a struggle in that heat. And we’d been struggling with the balance of the car all weekend, so we were changing so many different things.
“We got a good qualifying, but unfortunately, the race was too much of a struggle for us,” summed up Hamilton, as Russell too felt the Brit’s pain, when he added: “When I saw that [everybody around on the medium], I was thinking, ‘Lewis won’t be happy.”
His work was praised by Allison, though. Russell eventually managed to hold off a faster Leclerc after keeping his tyres alive for the last part. “I think great credit to George for preserving a bit of life in the tyre towards the end of the race,” said Allison. “Big up also to the guys at HPP who got all the switch settings dead right so that we had as much as the power unit was able to give for those very tense closing laps.
“And I think too that Leclerc had had to take a lot out of his tyres getting to George. So we saw some very, very fast laps from Charles earlier and that had allowed him to arrive up behind George with a few laps to have a go at him before the chequered flag but by the time he did get there he’d taken the edge off his tyres, there wasn’t quite as much for him to lean on when it came to getting by George.
“And then George drove very, very neat and tidily and just managed to stay ahead, which was a great relief to us and a good effort to George who was by that stage feeling a bit second best with the heat in the car and at the end of a long race.”
Here’s Mercedes on troubled Singapore GP
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