Lewis Hamilton agreed that the whole F1 Monaco GP weekend did not pan out the way they wanted and that there will be talks behind the scenes.
Hamilton agrees that it wasn’t a good team performance in F1 Monaco GP, where nothing clicked, from pace to even strategy for them. They were already looking down during the practice and it turned into a disaster for the Brit in qualifying with a seventh place finish.
Valtteri Bottas managed it well in third, as Hamilton complained of tyre warm-up issue. The Brit noted of a set-up change from Thursday to Saturday, which further hampered their run. He was not happy and showed his old outspoken nature when things go awry.
In the grand prix too, Hamilton and Mercedes tried to undercut AlphaTauri’s Pierre Gasly and other cars, but it failed. In general, the overcut showed more potential, as the Brit not only lost a place to the Frenchman but also to Sebastian Vettel and Sergio Perez.
If not for Charles Leclerc’s non-start and Bottas’ pit failure, Hamilton could have ended up only ninth and not seventh. Post-race, he showed brave face, but noted that the team will have to pick up, especially with Baku also not being a happy hunting ground.
“The pit stop cost us three places in the end,” started Hamilton. “I don’t really have a reaction to it. We do all of our talking in the background, so we’ll work together and try to come out of this strong. But we under-performed as a team all weekend. For our team, it’s through our losses and our mistakes that we always grow stronger.
“As I said, this has definitely been a poor weekend overall in terms of our performance, but this team has shown time and time again, how we come back fighting. There’s no finger pointing, we win and we lose together – we just need to find our feet and stay cool, we have 18 races left and there’s a long way to go in this fight.
“We’ll be working hard because we need to make sure this doesn’t happen again. There’s no reason why we should be performing like this on any weekend with all the experience we have together as a team. We’ll have some good discussions internally, it’s painful to learn these lessons but we’ve done it many times before,” summed up Hamilton.
Looking at the grand prix, Hamilton was piling good pressure on Gasly at the start, but just couldn’t pass him, which was the same case after the pit stop. It led to a radio rant, but eventually he settled down. In fact, post-race, he spoke nothing on the radio too.
For Wolff, he and the team felt the undercut was the only feasible way for Hamilton to get on top of Gasly and other rivals. He said the outlap was fine but eventually it just wasn’t enough, as the car did not have enough pace to stay ahead.
“It wasn’t any better for us either, as we saw with Charles,” said Wolff. “We lacked the pace all weekend, as simple as that. The pit stop failure that we had, we need to investigate because we have completely machined wheel nut, and with Lewis, we just didn’t have the pace in the car.
“The undercut looked like the only feasible way of clearing Gasly, with tyre warm-up. Just the gap he had before of one and one & a half second was sufficient to stay ahead. There wasn’t any mistake, the out lap was good, the pit stop was ok but it just wasn’t enough,” summed up Wolff.
Here’s Valtteri Bottas, Toto Wolff and James Allison on pit debacle