Spanish GP report and analysis
The Mercedes driver lost out at the start, but a canny team strategy call turned the race around
It could be Hungary all over again here.”max Verstappen’s engineer Gianpiero Lambiase called it perfectly, and painfully, as Lewis Hamilton peeled off from behind his charge to pit for a second time with a third of the 2021 Spanish Grand Prix remaining. In that moment, Red Bull realised that Mercedes had set the board in horribly familiar fashion, sending Hamilton on a late-race charge with a tyre-life-offset advantage to win the encounter in much the same way as he had done at the Hungaroring in 2019. At least Red Bull’s considerable progress since the previous Barcelona race and Verstappen’s first-corner boldness had made it an engaging, if not action-packed, contest. But such was the swing that Mercedes’strategists had found with their second big call of the race that, when the moment of victory finally came, it wasn’t all that climactic. At the end of lap 59 of 66 – six laps earlier than Mercedes’ calculations had estimated – Hamilton raced onto the pit straight just 0.5s behind Verstappen, in position to make the race-winning pass. The Dutchman weaved across the road to try to break the tow he was producing, but defeat was inevitable. Hamilton surged level using his DRS advantage, then his fresher rubber allowed him to brake later and sweep into Turn 1 on the racing line – his 98th
Formula 1 career win was all but sealed.
Yet 59 laps earlier at that spot, Hamilton could have been forgiven for thinking he’d lost the race. The polesitter – a position Hamilton was in for the 100th time in his remarkable career – had made a fine getaway. It was perhaps slightly slower initially than his fellow front-row starter, but the Mercedes made up enough ground in the next phase that Verstappen decided to pull in behind it. And here was where
Hamilton made his only real mistake of last weekend.
“Valtteri [Bottas] was obviously starting in third and the goal was to work as a team,”he would later explain.“so, I stayed to the left.
I think in hindsight there could have been a moment, looking back, that when Max moved in behind me for a second, I could have pulled across and sealed the job there – but I didn’t.”
Verstappen didn’t need a second invitation, with the Mercedes firmly holding the outside line. He stole to Hamilton’s inside at the Turn 1 braking point and brashly pushed his way to the racing line for the closely following Turn 2. Here, as the title favourites went wheel
to-wheel for the fourth time in four races so far in 2021, Hamilton had a choice to make, one that sent him down the path that ultimately ended in such uncomfortably recognisable fashion for Red Bull.
“I just made sure I gave as much space as I could to Max,”he said of his choice to back out of a clash.“in my mind, it’s always a marathon, not a sprint, so I’m just always thinking the long game. Sure, you could be a little bit more aggressive. Do I need to? Well, I’m in the position that I’m in because I don’t get too aggressive when I don’t need to be.”
Wise words from the seven-time world champion but, given the extreme challenge of overtaking in a straight fight to the finish at Barcelona, Hamilton knew his only hope of getting the lead back was to quickly“switch into a different mode”mentally.“after that
I was just hunting,”he explained.
The battle for the win was effectively a two-horse race just two corners after Verstappen’s lunge got him ahead. With Hamilton checking up and then regathering his momentum through Turn 2, the following Bottas had to do likewise. But even he“didn’t see”what was coming next. In exactly the same way that Fernando Alonso had roared past Hamilton’s Mercedes and Kimi Raikkonen’s Lotus at the start of the 2013 Spanish GP, Charles Leclerc sent his Ferrari shooting around Bottas’s left-hand side – the outside – as they raced through Turn 3. Leclerc was so fast that the move was over way before the corner fully unwound and the Turn 4 right approached. Over the race’s first seven laps, Leclerc shipped nearly 10s to Verstappen, with Bottas unable to find a way past. Meanwhile, Verstappen’s lead – 1.5s at the end of the first lap – grew to a maximum of 1.9s.
But both Mercedes drivers were given the chance to make amends for their disappointing starts when the safety car was called on lap eight. Yuki Tsunoda’s miserable weekend had ended when a sudden, and so far unexplained, loss of fuel pressure caused his Alphatauri to shut down as he approached the reprofiled Turn 10 long left on lap seven. The car ground to a halt on the runoff heading to the corner’s exit and had to be craned away.
Although it offered a chance of quick redemption, the lap 11 restart did not go the Black Arrows drivers’respective ways. Verstappen left Hamilton behind when he hit the gas exiting the final chicane, and then weaved on the straight – this time with no sense of accompanying foreboding – to disrupt the tow back to the pack. In any case, Leclerc was closer to Hamilton than the Briton was to Verstappen, which
“I’M IN THE POSITION I’M IN BECAUSE I DON’T GET TOO AGGRESSIVE
WHEN I DON’T NEED TO BE”
also prevented Bottas from rescuing third at this stage.
So, once again, the two leaders raced clear of the Ferrari, with Bottas cooped up all the way to his first stop on lap 23. Over the course of the first stint, the gap between Verstappen and Hamilton rather ebbed and flowed, with the world champion generally unable to get within DRS range. But from a maximum gap of 1.5 seconds at the end of lap 20, Verstappen’s advantage then began to fall quite pointedly, as he struggled to match Hamilton in lapping in the low to mid 1m23s.
Then came two significant Verstappen mistakes. At the end of lap 24 he“called himself in”, according to Red Bull team boss Christian Horner, and entered the pits one lap earlier than his squad was anticipating. Nevertheless, Red Bull reacted rapidly to get his new medium tyres ready, the left-rear arriving just after Verstappen had stopped and leading to approximately two seconds of additional stationary time (given Red Bull’s typical sub-2s pit prowess).
When he rejoined, Verstappen was pushing hard – too hard at
Turn 5, as he trailed team-mate Sergio Perez, already effectively a pitstop adrift while running sixth early on behind Daniel Ricciardo.
Verstappen locked up at the left-hander and appeared to damage the left-front tyre of the mediums he’d be attempting to get to the finish.
But despite all the tyre drama, Verstappen was still going so quickly that Mercedes concluded“by the time Lewis got to about Turn 10”, according to team director of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin, that pitting to immediately mirror Red Bull wasn’t going to cut it.
“We were ready, and we were getting the crew ready and all we were doing was monitoring the gap,”shovlin explained.“[but] we cancelled that. Because otherwise we would have dropped out just behind him and had a repeat of the [first] stint. When you can’t take position, you then move to look to get an offset.”
And that’s exactly what Mercedes chose to do. It left Hamilton lapping at the head of the pack for a further four laps. He had handed time to his now medium-shod rival during that phase, yet it was worth it for what came next. Once Hamilton had come in to trade his softs for mediums at the end of lap 28, he faced a 5.6s deficit the next time he came across the finish line. But the offset Mercedes had targeted meant he could unleash his potential in free air, with Leclerc pitting on the same lap as Hamilton from his distant third place (already set to emerge behind Bottas, thanks to the Finn’s own excellent pace after his respective earlier release to take the mediums).
Hamilton just carved his way back up to Verstappen, who was trying “everything to manage it as good as I could, looking after tyres and stuff”. The Mercedes closed in at a rate of 1.1s per lap over the first four tours that followed Hamilton’s out-lap. By the end of lap 33, he was back to 1s behind. But at this point, Verstappen did something that looked like it might have won him the race had things worked out differently for Red Bull. He upped his pace considerably, moving from the mid-1m22s to the mid-1m21s, which stymied Hamilton’s charge. For the next nine laps, the status quo that had held for most of the first stint returned. Had Hamilton overdone it on his charge back to the Red Bull? Could Verstappen hang on to nurse his mediums over effectively two-thirds distance despite Hamilton’s constant close presence?
With the benefit of hindsight, and by recalling how Verstappen was
losing time towards the end of his first stint on the softs, we can speculate that the latter consideration would have been a very tough ask. Most teams had come into the race with a plan to make the one-stopper work, but it proved to be very difficult, even with the overtaking challenge.
But, of course, this is all academic because of what Mercedes did next. At the end of lap 42, it suddenly called Hamilton in for a second stop. It was an aggressive call, one that instantly set up a charge to the finish. And Mercedes was able to take that bold route because of the advantage the leaders had pulled out on the pursuing pack.
As good as Leclerc was last Sunday, his Ferrari’s pace deficit to Verstappen and Hamilton meant he was 27.6s off the lead at the end of lap 41. That was more than enough time for Mercedes to bring Hamilton in and take another set of mediums – this one scrubbed – and emerge ahead, with only its other car shooting inevitably past.
“Because the field opened up so quickly behind them, Lewis effectively got a free stop,”said Horner.“they’ve got the choice [to say], ‘OK, we don’t think we’re going to pass him on track because we haven’t managed it in the first 40 laps, we’ll go for a two-stop.’at that point, if you cover the following lap, you’ve given up track position. And they just had a faster car than us, so all we could do really was try and hang it out and see if we could maintain a decent pace [to the finish].”
But that simple situation was only possible for Mercedes because of something else unnervingly familiar for Red Bull. Just as in Hungary nearly two years ago, Verstappen was taking on Mercedes solo, with no team-mate running close by that either could have disrupted Hamilton’s charge, or warned Mercedes off attempting it altogether.
“BECAUSE THE FIELD OPENED UP SO QUICKLY BEHIND THEM, LEWIS EFFECTIVELY GOT A FREE STOP”
Perez’s problems started with his poor qualifying, hampered by shoulder pain. But the problems got bigger even after he gained ground off the line, when he was so quickly dropped out of the lead fight by his place down the order. After effectively waving Verstappen through during the first pitstop phase, he had then fallen to 43.8s behind his team-mate, and was still bottled up behind Ricciardo’s Mclaren, on the lap Hamilton stopped again. And Red Bull knew exactly how costly the gap between Verstappen and Perez was.
“We desperately need him to be in that gap, so Mercedes don’t have the strategic options that they had,” horner reflected. “lewis got a free stop as he had in Hungary. He’s only got to get past his team-mate, and that was never going to be an issue. So yeah, that’s why we need both cars up there strategically, so that option isn’t available to Mercedes.”
While Horner’s assessment should make a point to Perez – let’s not forget that after he failed to provide proper back-up to Verstappen in the infamous Hungary defeat, Pierre Gasly lost his Red Bull drive – there was one aspect of his summary that wasn’t quite spot on.
Something could still go wrong for Mercedes and, to a certain extent, very nearly did. Hamilton’s pace in his third stint was scintillating. In the 16 laps after he completed his second out-lap he was 1.4s faster
per lap than Verstappen. But on the ninth tour of that run, he caught his team-mate. Bottas was ordered“don’t hold Lewis up”, but didn’t exactly make things easy for his team-mate as he was trying to“do the best thing I could for us as a team and for myself”. That meant losing as little time as possible to ensure he had a gap to make a late stop ahead of Leclerc (who also stopped twice anyway) to try to chase the fastest lap, something of a selfish attitude given how late Mercedes was predicting Hamilton would catch Verstappen.
In the end, Hamilton scythed ahead at Turn 10, insisting“valtteri was completely fair”regarding the positioning of the other Mercedes.
And ultimately, it didn’t matter given that Hamilton continued on his way and duly defeated Verstappen at pretty much the same place where he had initially been stumped.
“I really need to take my hat off for the group of strategists, led by James [Vowles] and all the group back in Brackley,”mercedes boss Toto Wolff said afterwards.“they are just fantastic, the mathematicians and strategists, coming up with all the simulations. You ask for a plan, and suddenly it is all there.‘at the end,’they said in our plan,‘if we were to stop now, we could end up catching him one lap to the end, he would have a tyre differential of 1.4s, and we believe that it is enough.’you trust them and trust the data. But they were terribly wrong – we caught him [six] laps to the end.”
What is intriguing is that, despite its faith in switching to a twostopper, Mercedes wasn’t convinced that Red Bull wouldn’t try the same trick. Again, just like in Hungary, Hamilton was urged to“box opposite Verstappen”just before he came in for the critical second stop.“when it came to the point where we pulled the trigger, we were probably nudging towards being worried that Max was going to do it before us,”explained Shovlin.
But Red Bull was adamant that it couldn’t afford to sacrifice the track position Verstappen had done well to seize at the first corner. Plus, it had come into the race with only a new set of hards (never a realistic option given its poor performance compared to the softer compounds in relatively cool Barcelona temperatures) or new softs left to give Verstappen at any theoretical second stop.“[the softs] wouldn’t have had the range that those mediums would’ve had,”horner surmised. “I think the reality is, whatever we would’ve done, they just had a faster car with slightly less deg than us.”
Immediately after Hamilton retook the lead for good, Red Bull pitted Verstappen to give him the chance to grab the fastest-lap bonus point, which he took with a 1m18.149s versus Bottas’s 1m19.430s. And in the aftermath of the race at F1’s laboratory venue, a trend was being plotted: that Red Bull has a car a shade faster in ultimate pace, but which wears its rear tyres harder across race stints. This would explain Verstappen’s struggles at the end of his first stint, and why he felt“when we put on the mediums, [Hamilton] had a lot more pace – he could just stay within one second, so there was not much we could have done”.
There was, however, a sense that Red Bull could have done something with both of its cars in play at the front in Spain.
But if Verstappen thought that too, he wasn’t giving it away when asked what Red
Bull has to do to finally win a‘hungary 2019 situation’ should it reoccur.
“Just need a faster car,”he said.“it’s very simple. Then you don’t need to get into a situation like that.”
“THEY ARE JUST FANTASTIC, THE STRATEGISTS. YOU ASK FOR A PLAN, AND SUDDENLY IT IS ALL THERE”