“The undercut was the only chance that we had”– Mercedes claims it saw potential in disastrous Monaco GP stratergy

“The undercut was the only chance that we had”– Mercedes claim that they saw a potential in the strategy used by Lewis Hamilton in Monaco.

Lewis Hamilton had a race to forget on Sunday, as he lost his lead position in the drivers’ championship after finishing 7th at the Monaco Grand Prix.

However, in the middle of the race, Mercedes tried to undercut the latter, only to find out Gasly would be pitting a lap later, which fumed Hamilton.

After a while, Sebastian Vettel and Sergio Perez were both able to get the overcut, leaving the seven-time world champion down in seventh once again. However, Toto Wolff feels that the undercut call was required, but it didn’t pay off.

“I think the undercut was the only chance that we had,” Wolff said when asked by Autosport/Motorsport.com about the strategy call. We saw the tyre that came off, and there was nothing left, similar to Valtteri [Bottas]’s car.

“There was some communication between him and the strategists, are we undercutting, and we felt the undercut had much bigger potential to kind of jump Gasly. And it wasn’t enough.”

We could understand his anger.

Hamilton was not satisfied with the call, and Mercedes’ James Allison claims that he can understand why Hamilton was angry, but it was important to get past Gasly.

“It is always a finely-balanced call and today we picked the wrong one of those two options,” Allison said. “Lewis still had some rubber left on the tyre for what would have been a few decent laps.”

“But the chances are that Gasly wouldn’t have stopped anytime soon. and our fear was that Gasly was going to simply just stay out there as a roadblock forever.”

“We didn’t have good options either way. We had to make the undercut stick in order to then stop the world from falling on our heads as it did today.

“Sadly by choosing the undercut and not making it work, the world did fall on our heads with the subsequent loss of places to Vettel and to Perez.”

About the author

Tanish Chachra

Tanish Chachra is the Motorsport editor at The SportsRush. He saw his first race when F1 visited India in 2011, and since then, his romance with the sport has been seasonal until he took up this role in 2020. Reigniting F1's coverage on this site, Tanish has fallen in love with the sport all over again. He loves Kimi Raikkonen and sees a future world champion in Oscar Piastri. Away from us, he loves to snuggle inside his books.

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