Lewis Hamilton would have gone below Lando Norris if he hadn’t stopped for the pitstop during the final laps of the race in Turkey.
Lewis Hamilton wanted to complete the race with his intermediate tyres, with which he started the race in Turkey. But Mercedes saw it as a massive risk to pull and called in Lewis Hamilton after tolerating the Briton’s dissent.
Though Mercedes was initially all-in for the idea as they predicted the track to go dry eventually. But eventually, they realized it was not going to happen, and they thought if they stuck with Hamilton’s ideas, they would lose more than gain.
After the race, Mercedes revealed that Hamilton was losing time to the drivers behind, and Pirelli claimed that he wouldn’t have even finished the race. But in the latest update, the Silver Arrows reveal Hamilton would have finished P8 if he had not pit-stopped.
“We stayed out for longer than that hoping that the track would go dry, hoping for a little while that the tyres would last… and we would get the easiest third place on offer at the time simply by inheriting it from those that did do a pit stop,” Mercedes’ Chief Technical Officer James Allison said on Mercedes’ Race Debrief video on their YouTube channel.
It was not going well for Lewis Hamilton
Hamilton was bewildered by his team’s decision, as he genuinely thought he had a fighting chance with his tyres. But the tech with Mercedes was proving him wrong with the facts.
“By the time we realized that we should have made that stop then and we were looking to cut our losses, it was round about Lap 41 –and that too would have been okay, that would have been a fourth-place type of stop.”
“In the end, we pushed on a bit longer than that, another nine laps with the tyres degrading all the while. When we eventually did call Lewis in.”
“It was because the lap time chart that we use to make our predictions was telling us that it was not looking good for hanging on to the end of the race – that the car’s pace by then would be sufficiently poor that… we were looking at something that was somewhere in the region of seventh, eighth place, based on the way in which the tyres were progressively degrading.”
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