Mercedes F1 has managed to identify what cost Lewis Hamilton a good qualifying last weekend in Miami. Andrew Shovlin, director of on-track engineering, reveals that the Briton suffered a gust of wind, which ruined his lap and caused him to qualify ninth, even though he had set the best time in Q2.
“We were very happy with the time he set in Q2 and we hoped to repeat it in Q3” Shovlin explained. “It wasn’t really a grip issue at the start, and the start of the lap was actually quite good.”
“He was unlucky, because when he arrived at turn 11, he received a gust of wind coming from behind. This had the effect of considerably reducing the downforce of the car. Entering this corner , so he had a lot of oversteer. This causes the tire temperature to rise.”
“Once the temperature gets there, it’s a very tight, twisty section, there’s no way for them to cool down and that’s what causes the loss of grip. So if there’s no Had it not been for this gust of wind, the tour would have been better, that’s for sure.”
Mercedes’ tire strategy was also costly for Hamilton: “The other thing that cost us was that we only had one new soft tire at the time, so he couldn’t go another lap and try to do the same thing again .”
“So it’s frustrating because at that point the car was working well for him. He was obviously driving it really well, and it’s a shame we couldn’t do that lap again when it mattered. “
Surprisingly, Mercedes used medium tires to complete Q3, and Shovlin explains that this was done because of the lack of soft tires, but also because the medium looked promising the day before.
“We had a look on the first day, we did a lap on the soft tires, which is not unusual. But what was a little bit different was that in Q1 we We decided to make two new sets of tires, so we did three runs with the two drivers, one used and two new.”
“This was partly because we had struggled the day before in sprint qualifying. We wanted to make sure the drivers had time to understand what the car was doing, but that caused us to lose a game compared to to the other. When we finally got to Q3, we only had one left.
“We had a run on the medium tire in Q3. We had seen that it was quite competitive the day before. We didn’t think it was faster, but for Lewis, actually, because the first lap was went so badly with the gust of wind, that medium tire was actually the weather he qualified with.”
“We used it because we didn’t see a big drop in lap performance, so we weren’t too worried about having that lap on the tire for Sunday’s race.”
