“It was pointless to defend”– Lewis Hamilton reveals why it was pointless to defend against Max Verstappen in the last two laps.
Max Verstappen had a thrilling end to his French Grand Prix contest as he overtook Lewis Hamilton in the second last lap to claim his victory at the Paul Ricard circuit.
The impressive two-stop strategy forced Mercedes to bow their knees, so much that Hamilton thought it was pointless to defend against Verstappen by then.
“Firstly, there’s marbles on the inside so I I didn’t want to make my tyres any worse than they already were,” Hamilton told RacingNews365.com.
“He [Verstappen] had the DRS open, and if he didn’t pass me there, he would have overtaken me on the other straight afterwards, so it made zero difference.
“I just had no front end, so he would have gone the other way so it was pointless to defend any harder. You saw, what happened to Valtteri and he just ended up going straight on so no point messing up the tyres anymore.”
Two-pit stop strategy was the way.
Like Valtteri Bottas, Hamilton also believes that the two-pitstop strategy was the way to beat Hamilton and also showed his disappointment with speed after the race.
“A two-stop would have potentially done the job,” said Hamilton. “But it was not on the cards us at all so we will do some analysis and try and figure out why.”
But Toto Wolff still believes the one-pit stop strategy was a gamble worth taking, as claimed by him during a post-race interview. Nevertheless, by the time Mercedes could react, Red Bull had the momentum in their hand.
Also, the Milton-Keynes team had their strategies at the right spot and worked well to split the Mercedes by the end of the race.
