Here's an in-depth analysis of the battle in Monaco:
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Analysis: Lewis Hamilton’s foiled plan to beat Nico Rosberg in Monaco pit stops.........
Could Hamilton have beaten Rosberg on pit stop strategy?Lewis Hamilton was not a happy man going into Sunday’s Monaco Grand Prix and he was even less happy after he was called in to pit on the same lap as race leader Rosberg, meaning that he had no chance to try something strategy wise to beat him.
He was heard to question the decision, also suggesting that at McLaren he would have been allowed to pre-empt the safety car and come in early after Adrian Sutil crashed heavily on lap 24.
The first car to pit was Jenson Button. Mclaren always brief the drivers that there is a “Safety Car window”, where they can pit at their discretion if they see an accident or “SC” boards, before the team see it and if they are in a late phase of the lap.
They were very clear on this and it’s something that other teams have been encouraged to try and copy. This is not a policy in place at Mercedes. This is what Hamilton was talking about when he referred to McLaren.
Mercedes run a clear policy of leading driver stop preference in races, something which Hamilton has benefitted from in the previous four races this year, which he has won.
Here, the situation was that Mercedes had a 1-2 and a margin of 12 seconds over the third car, Kimi Raikkonen. Hamilton was in Turn 13 when the TV cameras revealed that Sutil had crashed heavily, so there was time to call them in.
However there was no guarantee a Safety Car would be deployed, as later incidents like the Gutierrez shunt proved. This was an exercise in managing probabilities – it was 90% likely that a Safety Car would be used, but there was 0% risk to Mercedes of losing positions by by doing an extra lap and waiting to see if a Safety Car was deployed. This is because in that situation, all the cars are obliged to run at a set Safety Car speed, which is 140% of the normal lap time.
If Hamilton had pitted and there had been no Safety Car he would have been behind the Ferraris and could have been vulnerable to Ferrari deliberately leaving one of their cars out to block him while the other built a gap. Given that the “blocking” car would be Alonso, this is doubtful, but you never know.
Incidentally, Button didn’t gain any places by diving into the pits, because everyone went at the same speed once the “Safety Car Deployed” signs went out. It only works when someone does something wrong or unusual – in Australia Button gained two places with this trick because Alonso stacked up the cars behind him. Here there was nothing there for the taking.
But still, it can bring a gain and Hamilton will have remembered that he lost places to Vettel and Webber in this way under the Safety Car in Monaco last year, a painful memory so he felt it was worth a try.
The point is that, from the Mercedes’ point of view, there was no obvious gain for Hamilton in making a stop after Sutil crashed, but there were some risks. Mercedes has a single head of strategy on site and his job is to deliver a Mercedes 1-2 finish. However he has also been tasked with giving his drivers a chance to race.
And it is here that Hamilton’s real frustration lay, because there was a plan in place..
As Rosberg the leader had stop priority, the only way for Hamilton to beat him was to wait until Rosberg had stopped and then push like mad on the supersoft tyres for the next lap. At the same time, Rosberg would be on an out-lap with new soft tyres, which were quite hard and took a long time to warm up. This would have been Hamilton’s opportunity; to offset himself against Rosberg, then pit and hopefully emerge ahead of the German, if he had struggled with new tyre warm-up.
To pull it off he would have needed to have been more than 6/10ths of a second faster on old supersofts than Rosberg on new softs on that lap.
But because the Safety Car came out in a pit stop window, he never had the chance to try it.
So he was immensely frustrated – on top of his resentment at the manner in which he felt Rosberg had gained the advantage in qualifying – and this is what came out over the radio and after the race.........
After the agony of defeat, success will be sweet!
