Deciding a strategy in the course of work is risky and often involves debates between two factions, especially in Formula 1, where the garage has the data but the driver experiences the sensations of the track and often has the last word. He didn’t have it in Turkey Lewis Hamilton, who had to bend to the will of the Mercedes garage: the British did not want to stop for the pit stop, and if he had to, he would have mounted the slicks, but in the end he changed the intermediates and, in the end, he did not earn positions on Perez and Leclerc. The attempts to convince him by team principal Toto Wolff and the head of track engineers Andy Shovlin were useless: Hamilton covertly accused the team of not having made the right choice and let himself go to nervousness via radio (“I told you so, now thereabstain from me in peace“).
🗨️ “Je ne sais pas quoi dire. Yes Ocon l’a fait, j’aurais pu le faire”
Lewis Hamilton thinks qu’il n’avait pas besoin de s’arrêter et lutter pour la 3ème place 🗣️#TurkishGP 🇹🇷
▶️ https://t.co/7plkVVV12v pic.twitter.com/cWDwJQM90a
– CANAL + F1® (@ CanalplusF1) October 10, 2021
The seven-time world champion doesn’t want to hear reasons. For him, valuable points have been thrown away in the fight for the World Cup. And when they told him that Esteban Or with went to the top-10 while not stopping in the pits, the British struggled to stay calm: “Did he really do it? (shakes his head and sighs, ed). I do not know what to say. If Ocon managed to complete the race without a pit stop, I could too“, These are his words a Canal +. It must be said that the Frenchman was lucky to get points: Antonio Giovinazzi had him in his sights and with one more lap he would have overtaken him, also because the Alpine driver’s tires were literally gone. But this, to a seven-time world champion, matters relatively in the face of the possibility of taking even a single point more.