IT’S THE PITS
Hamilton fury as forced stop sees him lose more ground in race for 8th crown
LEWIS HAMILTON’S fury soon turned to a more measured tone once he had climbed out of the cockpit.
But if he ends up missing out on an eighth world title due to the decisions taken during a damp afternoon in Istanbul then he may struggle to be so philosophical.
Had he ignored Mercedes’ call to change tyres there was every possibility he could have ended up lower than the fifth place he managed to secure, rather than hang on to the third place he occupied when the instruction came over the radio.
But in the heat of battle the call to pit for fresh rubber in the closing stages was the subject of a bad tempered exchange between Hamilton and his race engineer Pete Bonnington.
“S***, man, why did you give up that place?” moaned Hamilton. “We shouldn’t have come in, man. I told you!”
The radio message informing him of the gap to Pierre Gasly’s Alpha Tauri, running in sixth, was an even bigger blow.
“Leave it alone man!” replied
Hamilton, who had just seen the potential of a one-point deficit to Max Verstappen in the title race extended to six.
Despite Hamilton’s annoyance, the likely explanation of where it really all went wrong came from his boss Toto Wolff.
Wolff said: “We balanced between pitting or taking a bit of a gamble and finishing third. The correct call would probably have been taking it very conservative and pitting when everyone pitted for the intermediate, coming out behind [Sergio] Perez, probably behind [Charles] Leclerc and then fighting with them on track for P3.”
That Hamilton had to fight his way through the field at all was down to the decision to install a fourth internal combustion engine, Mercedes choosing to accept the 10-place grid penalty rather than risk his old one going bang.
The sight of his team-mate Valtteri Bottas romping to victory ahead of Verstappen, the Dutchman’s Red Bull team-mate Sergio Perez occupying the final podium place, was another bitter pill for Hamilton to swallow. He said: “It felt good to be in third and I was like, ‘if I can just hold on, it would be a great result from 11th’.”