As we reported to you yesterday, Lewis Hamilton revealed that he had fought with Mercedes F1 not to start on soft tires. The team insisted this was the case and James Allison, the technical director, admits 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 everyone else did and go with the mediums.”
The engineer nevertheless recognizes that the team did not expect the soft tires to perform poorly: “The reasoning was that the soft tire very often allows you to escape sharply from the start and gives you a good chance of gaining a place or two in the first few laps of the race.”
“And we didn’t really expect, before the race, to encounter the kind of difficulties that we had with the soft tires. We thought that the soft compound would allow us to gain one or two places. That’s not the case , because the departure did not go as planned.”
“We were also hoping that the downside of the soft compound, which is a bit more fragile, wouldn’t manifest itself too badly, because if you look at the years in Singapore, overall the pace starts very, very easily to the Singapore race and the drivers then increase the pace for many laps, leaving a perfectly fine soft tire to run relatively far into the refueling window.”
“So we didn’t have any places at the start, the pace started to pick up from lap five. And Lewis ended up with a car that wasn’t particularly happy anyway, suffering from pretty low tire degradation and having to come home early as a result, which really ruined his race. So it was an obvious mistake.
Mercedes was hoping to have a free stop to put on medium tires 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 advantages of this strategy.”
“But once we committed to the soft-hard strategy, we considered switching to two stops for Lewis at different points in the race. But even though that would have put him on fresher tires and “he would have been faster on these fresher tires, all our calculations suggested that he would not have been able to achieve the targets set.”
“All our calculations suggested that he would not have recouped the loss from the pit stops. We could have used him, which would have been a good thing in a safety car. But in a normal, uninterrupted race , which we had in Singapore for the first time in ages, that tire wouldn’t have helped Lewis this weekend.”
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