Lewis Hamilton not happy with his shocking run in F1 Canadian GP despite the points finish, as Toto Wolff says he has seen much worse fighting between teammates.
It was surprisingly a strong and spirited performance from Mercedes in F1 Canadian GP, especially at a time when they are clearly behind the Top 3 teams. In Montreal, irrespective of the weather conditions, both Hamilton and George Russell showed good pace.
Russell got pole for his efforts and ended up on the podium. Hamilton showed glimpses but fell short in qualifying, only to improve to fourth in the race battling his teammate and Oscar Piastri for the podium. Despite the upswing, the Brit was not happy with how he performed overall.
He lamented the qualifying blip and noted about being stuck behind Fernando Alonso for long in his first stint. He was confused with the slick tyre choice too and had a moment which was unseen on the world feed. He was also held up by Zhou Guanyu at one point which cost him more time.
He was eventually pleased to score handy points, but was shocked with his own driving. “On one side, I’m happy that we are progressing and we have positives to take from this weekend,” said Hamilton. “But it was a pretty disastrous afternoon in qualifying and then the race was pretty shocking on my side. So I can’t say I am particularly happy with it.
“I have no clue with the tyres, I am not quite understanding what happened. George went on the hard before or something like that. I didn’t have another set. Regarding our fight, he was on the medium tyre which was much faster. The medium tyre was really quick and then I went onto the hard tyre and the grip was terrible on it.
“I didn’t actually know he was going onto a medium tyre otherwise I would have stayed out and stayed on mediums. Overall, I could have just driven better. Less mistakes. I was stuck behind Fernando so there was nothing I could really do there. I made lots of mistakes over the weekend as a whole, but lots of positives to take in terms of performance.
“So, I’ll try and improve for the next race,” summed up Hamilton, as team boss Wolff stated that he had seen ‘much worse’ battles between his teammates when asked about the brief run from Russell on his teammate to take away third from him.
In their post-race debrief, Mercedes’ James Allison explained their tyre strategy in detail which raised some question marks. “When the track gradually dried up and went to wet, we did not put Lewis on the Hard tyre,” he started. “We put him on the Medium tyre. We used up his final fresh set of Mediums to give him the car on the track, on the tyre that subsequently was shown to be the quicker tyre.
“Later in the race, when we stopped behind the safety car to put Lewis onto a fresh set of tyres, and then we switched him from the Medium to the Hard. That decision was the correct one because Lewis had a completely free stop. He was not threatened by anyone from behind. There was a safety car, which meant that he would be able to close back up on who was ever ahead of him and be in the trail behind the safety car, but he would be on fresh rubber.
“Those ahead of him, other than his teammate, would be on used rubber, and it is not a question whether a brand new Hard would be quicker than a 12, 13 lap old Medium. While he might have preferred a new Medium, there were no new Mediums to have. That was not an option. The only new tyre we had was a Hard, and that was going to be quicker than anything that was ahead of him on the track.
“That is why he ended up on the Hard and definitely faster than the McLarens and the Red Bull. The more interesting question is why did we fit George with a Hard tyre when the track went from wet to dry and fit Lewis with a Medium? Or why did we fit Lewis on a Hard when Medium was clearly the quickest?
“The fact that we chose different tyres for the two different drivers was because it was not clear. It absolutely was not. These things are clear afterwards, but not clear beforehand. When we ran on the Friday, the grid ran on the Friday with the Medium tyres, almost everybody in the pit lane grained the tyre.
“Once the tyre grains, it loses its performance very quickly and becomes an absolute sitting duck. The Hard tyre is more resistant to graining, maybe a little slower, but more resistant to graining. We fitted George with the Hard tyre as a hedge against the graining. There was a lot of the race still to go at that point when it was going from wet to dry.
“We fitted him with the Hard and everyone around him was on Mediums. Had they grained, then he would have just romped through them to an easy win. And while that might sound fanciful, look what happened to Piastri. His car was going backwards at a very, very swift rate. His tyres did grain.
“It was right on the cusp of graining or not graining. We fitted George with the Hard because that was his best shot of winning. And then just to sort of spread our bets, we fitted Lewis with the Medium. And then later on, there is a safety car, and at that point, the only tyres left in the hutch were for George a Medium, and for Lewis a Hard. They ended up on the reverse of what we had selected earlier.”
Here’s George Russell, Toto Wolff on podium
Here’s George Russell about seeing the groundhog
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