“One of the drivers was just slightly happier than the other” – Mercedes Chief Strategist James Vowles has stated the reasons for a poor performance by Lewis Hamilton at Monaco.
Mercedes had a poor outing at the Monaco Grand Prix, winning just 6 points out of a possible 44. While Valtteri Bottas was unfortunate to see his pit stop getting botched (yet again), Hamilton was short of his usual best pretty much the entire weekend.
Why did Lewis Hamilton struggle in Monaco GP?
Chief Strategist James Vowles has revealed the reason for the surprise dip in form of their champion driver, in their team’s Youtube debrief.
“Whereas Valtteri perhaps was a little bit behind him on Thursday, Valtteri was very much leading now of our two drivers.
“So, what was the difference? On Thursday we had around 47 to 50 degrees track temperature and it cooled down significantly by the time we got to Saturday, more around the mid-30s now.
“Now, that happens on a number of different circuits but in this particular case, it seems we just weren’t able to get ourselves into the right working regime with the tyres and one of the drivers was just slightly happier than the other.
“We tried a number of setup items but one of the issues that you have in Monaco is that it is a confidence builder. You need laps, you need consistent laps, you need confidence that the car is giving you everything you want out of it.
“If you can carry just a kilometre an hour or two more speed through turn one, two, three for example you generate just another temperature level, another degree or two which then gives you more grip through the next sequence.
“Conversely, if you don’t have confidence in the car and you don’t trust it, you go down the spiral in the other way and you lose grip.
“The setup between the two cars wasn’t dramatically different as we went into qualifying and race. Really, what had changed is just we weren’t able to extract everything from the car and the tyres as we wanted anymore.”
