In the Miami GP, for the fourth consecutive race, George Russell managed to cross the finish line in front of his teammate Lewis Hamilton. Certainly a significant result, considering that the young driver from King’s Lynn is in his first year with Mercedes and finds himself alongside the most successful driver in Formula 1 history. car of Ferrari and Red Bull, the feeling is that Russell – more than Hamilton – is able to extract greater speed and performance from the vehicle. However, it should also be noted that in Florida, for the second time this season, the seven-time world champion was penalized by the entry of the Safety Carwhich happened at the worst moment for his race strategy.
After the Grand Prix, the statements made by Hamilton to the media were much discussed. The Stevenage native has in fact complained a lot that the team asked him directly what he preferred to do in terms of strategy – whether to pit or not – instead of indicating a certain plan to follow. Through the usual Race Debrief video, posted by the Brackley team on YouTube, Mercedes indirectly tried to respond to its driver. Mike Elliottdt of the silver arrows, highlighted in particular how the entry of the safety car, which favored Russell, would have instead penalized Hamilton regardless of the choice of the # 44 to stay on track or return to the pits.
“We found ourselves between a rock and a hard place – Elliott explained – the Safety Car came at a completely wrong time for Lewis. If we hadn’t pitted him, he would have had George behind with a much newer tire. If we had made him come back he would have lost his track position in favor of George and would have ended up behind him“. Precisely for this ‘lost-lost’ situation, Mercedes wanted to ask Hamilton if he had a preference on how to proceed. “We only asked Lewis why there was no right or wrong answer – added the Mercedes dt again – and sometimes the drivers have a better feeling with the car than us engineers looking at the data“.
Also the fact that the seven-time world champion could count on a set of new soft tires would not help his cause, according to Elliott: “Even if we had fitted Lewis a new tire, the only ones we had were Hard or Soft. And while you might think the Softs would be a good solution, we knew they would overheat very quickly. They would also overheat even more quickly because George was behind and battling on the track. This would have overheated the tires even more“, He concluded.
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