James Allison talks about Mercedes improving from Friday to Sunday in F1 British GP, as they talk about the strategy they used.
It was another slow start to Mercedes weekend in F1 British GP where they did not have a solid Friday and even a moderate Saturday, but they banked on race pace which worked eventually after simulation work from Mick Schumacher at Brackley.
They worked late and it did help them to be in the Top 10 on Saturday and then eventually pounce on the opportunities presented on Sunday. Allison expands on the strategy decisions, especially starting differently and ending on the soft compound.
Changes made from Friday to Sunday –
Allison: “Over the years, the overnight work that happens on a Friday preparing for Saturday has become more and more of an important factor in the rhythm of your race weekend. This weekend was a particularly important one. We had seen on our Friday that we had a really good race car. We had good, consistent strong pace from both drivers, and it looked like we were going to use our tyres well in the race stints on Sunday. We knew that our set-up was there or thereabouts, and we wouldn’t want to change it too much because you might upset that delicate usage of the tyres that’s key to getting a good race run. However, we also knew on Friday that our one lap pace was woeful, and we were way down the time sheets; not with a bunch of excuses along with it, we were just slow. Our challenge overnight was how to find pace in a car for qualifying, without mucking about with the fundamental set-up of the car.
“That’s what they set out to do on Friday night in our simulator. The engineers and Mick Schumacher worked late into the night until 2am trying to figure out how to get the best preparation of the car to be in good shape for a qualifying lap, for that single push lap, without changing the fundamental setup. So only working on the things that you can change: the tyre pressures, the flap angles and so on. Things that you are allowed to change between qualifying and race and therefore things that we can do without upsetting the fundamental setup of the car. It was brilliant overnight work from that team and the result being that our single lap qualifying pace lifted right back up to being in the mix for a decent grid slot on the Saturday, which is what set up our ability to have a good race on Sunday.”
Soft tyre choice for Lewis Hamilton in final stint –
Allison: “Several other drivers of course chose the Hard tyre. But Lewis elected the Soft. Why did we do that? Well, we knew that we could make the Soft tyre run for a goodly number of laps and at a good pace. George had just shown us that with a car on full fuel from the beginning of the race, running at a decent pace with good tyre degradation and good performance. More important than that, we know that Silverstone is a tough track to overtake at; a big fast flowing circuit but the straights are not that long and the DRS effect not that big. You don’t get much of a chance to overtake there. You must have a lot of performance in hand to make it stick. We felt that our best opportunity of slipping past Norris with Lewis was going to be during the tyre warm-up phase, once the Safety Car goes in, and then everybody is trying to get up to full ramming speed as fast as possible. We suspected Norris was going to take the Hard tyre.
“We knew that we could be good on a Soft tyre, and we knew that for a few precious laps that would give us a decent performance margin over a very fast McLaren. If we could press our attack home in those few laps before the Hard tyre came up to temperature, then we might just nip by them and thereafter we would have the pace to stay in front. Our Soft tyre choice gave us our best opportunity to make that happen and indeed if you watch the restart off the back of the Safety Car with no DRS, and when the Soft tyre was performing at its best, even without that DRS we came incredibly close to making the overtake stick. In the end we weren’t quite quick enough to make it happen, and Norris was able to just gradually eke away from Lewis after his tyres came into their window. But it was a racing choice; our best opportunity we felt to get past a very racy McLaren on that day. It didn’t pay off, but it was a lot of fun, and we nearly did it.”
Starting soft tyre for George Russell –
Allison: “Probably a more compelling question is: Why didn’t they (Lewis and George) start on the same tyres? If Soft was good for George, then why not for Lewis? Or Medium for Lewis, why not for George? Why did we choose to split the strategy? We saw quite early on in the weekend a couple of things. All the tyres once they got up to racing temperature were quite similar in performance. The Soft tyre was better at the beginning but struggled a bit towards the end of its life, and the Hard the opposite with some warm-up and then Medium in between. But all of them quite similar to one another. We were thinking that if we could split our strategy and give the Soft tyre to one of our drivers and the Medium tyre to the other, then that would improve our chances of a good result overall. We’d seen that our car had been pretty good on the Soft tyre when we did our long runs on the Friday. We felt with George being in front of Lewis on the grid giving him the Soft tyre would give him his best chance of jumping past someone at the start. Indeed, that’s what happened. George managed to leapfrog one of the Ferraris in the start.
“We had a good result there and that’s what we hoped for from the choice. It wouldn’t have made sense with Lewis to try and jump his teammate because as a team we wouldn’t gain anything overall from that. Instead, choosing the Medium tyre, which we also knew would be a very strong race tyre, would give him his best chance of running long into the race in a Grand Prix which we were fairly certain was going to be a nailed on one-stop. That would give him a chance to maybe run in some free air towards the upper end of the strategy window. In the end, that played out beautifully for Lewis as well because by being able to run long, he was still on the track when the Safety Car came out and that played really nicely into his hands. A bit of a bummer for George to lose out under that Safety Car but those are the breaks. Overall, splitting the strategy just gave us our best chance, our best odds of having a good team result and actually for each individual driver it made sense as well.”
Here’s Lando Norris on Lewis Hamilton fight
