Hamilton seethes after Mercedes mistake puts dent in title chances
Champion angry after he is called in for late pit stop takes a six-point lead in drivers’ championship
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It was, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said, “only a five-point swing”. But how crucial could those five points be in a season that is fast developing into Formula One’s version of Squid Game, the new Netflix gore-fest in which the last contestant standing claims a big cash prize?
In a season as tight as this, any mistake could prove the difference in the final reckoning. And Mercedes, by their own admission, made one yesterday.
The call to bring Lewis Hamilton in for a new set of intermediate tyres with eight laps remaining of the Turkish Grand Prix – despite their driver repeatedly insisting he could make it to the finish on the set he had used from the start – dropped Hamilton from third to fifth.
Could Hamilton have made it to the finish? Might he have ended up losing more than just five points had he stayed out? We will never know.
What we do know is that it left him furious and ended up with Wolff talking about “trust” issues between the seven-time world champion and the Mercedes pit wall.
Red Bull will have enjoyed that. On a weekend when Mercedes unquestionably had the faster car, not only did Max Verstappen turn a one-point deficit into a six-point advantage in the title race, Mercedes were left with a disgruntled driver and facing awkward questions about strategy calls.
And this despite the fact that they actually won the race, with Valtteri Bottas nerveless throughout.
It was a funny old weekend; damp, wet, cold, and for the most part uneventful. But it built to a fascinating climax.
Hamilton had done an excellent job of “limiting the damage”, as he put it. Starting 11th on the grid thanks to Mercedes’ decision to take a fourth engine of the season, he had driven beautifully to make his way through the pack. Patient when he needed to be, brave when he had to be. One pass around the outside of Alphatauri’s Yuki Tsunoda was a real heart-in-mouth moment.
By lap 14 Hamilton was up to sixth and only 18 seconds behind Bottas at the front. True, he was beginning to complain about tyre wear, but it seemed to make little difference to his pace as he picked off Pierre Gasly for fifth. It was then that things started to get trickier. By lap 32 of 58, Hamilton was within a second of Red Bull’s Sergio Perez in fourth. But try as he might, he could not find a way past the Mexican.
The two went wheel to wheel through a dramatic sequence of corners on lap 35, each of them putting their nose in front, only for the other to slam the door shut. Perez eventually came out on top.
It was thrilling stuff for the crowd at Istanbul Park, who rose to applaud. The problem was, while they were busy racing, they were losing time to the front runners. Perez was doing his “rear-gunner” job for Verstappen perfectly.
By lap 36 the gap to the leaders was back up to 26 seconds and Verstappen was able to pit and come out ahead of his title rival.
At this point Mercedes had two options. The safe one was to pit their driver, to cover Perez and Charles Leclerc and hope Hamilton could pass them near the finish. The riskier option was to leave him out there and potentially, if the track dried enough, switch him to slicks later.
By lap 42, they had seemingly made up their minds. “Box, box,” race engineer Peter Bonnington told Hamilton. “Why?” came the reply. “New inters is the way to go,” he was told. “I don’t think it is, man.”
It was a fascinating standoff, with Hamilton getting his way on that occasion. And it looked like a genius call. By lap 50, with Ferrari’s Leclerc
and Perez having pitted, he was up to third and still hanging tough.
Mercedes, though, were clearly still worried, not least by Hamilton’s lap times, which were beginning to slow. Again they called him in. This time Hamilton acquiesced.
Almost immediately, he regretted it. Returning to the fray in fifth, behind Leclerc, Hamilton found he could not pass the Ferrari. Worse, his tyres quickly began to grain on the drying track. “We shouldn’t have come in, man. Massive graining! I told you!” he said, reproachfully.
A lap or two later, Bonnington was bravely on again to warn his driver about Gasly coming up behind. “Leave it alone, man!” Hamilton snapped back.
Was it 10 points gained, given the engine change and the grid penalty? Or five points lost? Pirelli’s Mario Isola suggested afterwards, having inspected the rubber on Hamilton’s tyres, that it would have been “very risky” to have stayed out.
Hamilton admitted there was no way of knowing for sure. “If you look at a couple of other drivers who did [stay out], they lost time and positions,” he said. “So it was a risk either way. But, I’m a risk-taker so I would have wanted to take that risk.”
It was Wolff, though, who gave the clearest answer, effectively admitting the team had bodged it. “Today was a very close call and we decided one way and it went wrong,” he conceded, saying the team needed to “work on our communication to trust each other”.
Could it be the difference between winning and losing the title? “It is going to be very tight until the end,” Wolff replied. “DNFS are going to make [the] big difference and that was another consideration today. Not three- or four- or five-point swings.” Perhaps. But in a season as tight as this, how crucial could those five points be?