As we reported yesterday, Lewis Hamilton revealed that he had fought with Mercedes F1 to avoid running on soft tyres. The team insisted that this be the case and James Allison, the technical director, admits that it was a mistake.
“We shouldn’t have started with the soft tyres, it was a mistake” Allison admitted. “If we could go back in time, we would do what others did and choose mediums.”
The engineer nevertheless acknowledges that the team did not expect a poor performance from the soft tires: “The reasoning was that the soft tyre very often allows you to get away sharply from the start and gives you a good chance of gaining a place or two in the first laps of the race.”
“And we didn’t really expect, before the race, to have the kind of difficulties we had with the soft tyres. We thought that the soft tyre would allow us to gain one or two places. That’s not the case, because the start didn’t go as planned.”
“We were also hoping that the downside of the soft compound, which is a bit more fragile, wouldn’t show up too badly, because if you look at the past years in Singapore, generally speaking the pace starts very, very easy at the Singapore race and then the drivers increase the pace over many laps, which leaves a very decent soft tyre to run relatively far into the pit window.”
“So we didn’t get any places at the start, the pace started to pick up from lap five onwards. And Lewis ended up with a car that wasn’t particularly happy anyway, suffering from quite low tyre degradation and having to pit early as a result, which really ruined his race. So it was an obvious mistake.”
Mercedes were hoping to have a free stop to put on medium tyres at the end of the race: “It was a great weapon. If there had been a safety car at an opportune moment in the race, that would have been one of the benefits of this strategy.”
“But once we committed to the soft-hard strategy, we considered going to two-stops for Lewis at different times during the race. But even though that would have put him on fresher tyres and he would have been quicker on those fresher tyres, all our calculations suggested he wouldn’t have been able to achieve the targets that we had set.”
“All our calculations suggested that it wouldn’t have recovered the loss from the pit stops. We could have used it, which would have been good during a safety car. But in a normal, uninterrupted race, which we had in Singapore for the first time in ages, that tyre wouldn’t have helped Lewis this weekend.”
