Lewis Hamilton’s Australian GP strategy explained by Mercedes

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Vettel on top in Melbourne1:48

F1: Sebastian Vettel takes out the first F1 race of the 2017 Championship

• March 26th 2017
• 7 days ago
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Forza Ferrari: German driver Sebastian Vettel celebrates on the podium with Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton (left) and Valtteri Bottas.

Mercedes has explained its strategy dilemma in the Australian GP after Lewis Hamilton was beaten to victory by Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel.

Hamilton had led last weekend’s season-opener from pole but was overhauled by his Ferrari rival through the sole round of pit stops, with Vettel eventually winning by a comfortable 10-second margin.

Ferrari jumped Mercedes by keeping Vettel out for six laps longer than Hamilton, with the Mercedes delayed after his stop by the Red Bull of Max Verstappen.

In a Mercedes video analysing the key decisions the team had to make in Melbourne, chief strategist James Vowles said the team thought Red Bull would pit Verstappen sooner than it did in order to undercut the Ferrari of Kimi Raikkonen ahead.

“If we stop, we knew we were going to drop behind Kimi and Verstappen, but if we’re suffering degradation, they should start to see a little bit as well at that point in time,” Vowles said.

“We’re not going to be likely to overtake in all likelihood against these cars, but there’s an interesting circumstance that appears — if we stop, Verstappen has an opportunity to beat Kimi into P4 (fourth position).

“The reason why? Ferrari have to keep Kimi out which means if Verstappen stops, and there’s a little gap behind him around about lap 20 appearing, that gives us free air to push up to the back of Kimi and maybe that will create the circumstance we need in order to win this race.

“So a very difficult decision and in the end I decided to go for it. I believe Verstappen would stop and he didn’t in the end and you saw what happened: 0.6 seconds, that was all that separated us and Vettel coming out of the pits. If Verstappen had stopped just one lap before we would have won that race.”

Lewis Hamilton powers his car around the Melbourne circuit.Source:AFP

Hamilton held a 1.9-second lead over Vettel at the end of lap 13 but the Ferrari had closed that down to within one-second DRS range by the lap the Mercedes pitted.

“A slow track to start, that’s normal for Melbourne, and then we started to push — Vettel responded. We started to push (again), Vettel responded,” explained Vowles.

“Then around about lap eight we told Lewis ‘right, let’s really get the hammer down now and see whether we can build this gap’ and Vettel responded straight away.

“In fact, what ended up happening is we started to see a little bit of degradation on the tyres and Vettel came back into our (pit) window. So this became a critical point in the race.”

Hamilton lost touch with the Ferrari over the remainder of the race and saw his advantage over new teammate Valtteri Bottas shrink to under two seconds in the closing stages.

Asked to assess Bottas’s debut after the Finn finished third, Vowles said: “Brilliant. For his first race out with the team we were very, very impressed with him. In qualifying you saw he was couple of tenths shy of where Lewis was, but he did a very solid job in the race.”

RED BULL WILL IMPROVE AFTER POOR START

Red Bull's Daniel Ricciardo was forced to drop out of the race.Source:AFP

Verstappen could only manage fifth while Daniel Ricciardo dropped out in the 2017 curtain-raiser after crashing in qualifying, as Red Bull fell well short of the standards set by Ferrari and

Mercedes.

But Sky Sports reporter Craig Slater believes Red Bull can still turn its season around and create a three-way battle for the title.

“(Team adviser) Dr Helmut Marko said to me during testing that they’re hoping the Renault power unit will be somewhere near competitive with Ferrari and Mercedes by mid-season,” Slater said.

“We sometimes think when they say mid-season they mean end of season. And you do just worry they’ll be on a little island on their own just behind those front two.

“But it could be a three-team fight by the end if Ferrari and Mercedes take wins off each other early doors and Red Bull come back into it.”

F1 Report television host Marc Priestley agreed Red Bull would step it up as the 2017 season progressed.

“It was one of those weekends to forget, and it was compounded by the fact the Red Bull isn’t as quick as they would have expected,” Priestley said. “It was a tough weekend (for Ricciardo) and everything that could have gone wrong went wrong.

“But don’t forget they’ve had to take off a fairly substantial trick suspension system after the FIA told them to remove it. The Mercedes had something similar but not quite as in-depth and I think it has hurt Red Bull a lot more.

“Their top speeds are quite low (compared to the top two) and I know the Renault power unit isn’t the strongest there, and all these things combined just mean they aren’t quite there.

“They’re going to be disappointed because they wanted to be up there. But they will develop and pick up the pieces if there are any mistakes in front of them, and I think they’ll be a lot stronger in the second half of the season.”

This article was originally published by Sky Sports and reproduced with permission.