Max Verstappen’s Red Bull race engineer on Sunday realized immediately what was going on when Lewis Hamilton, running a close second to the Dutch driver, suddenly pitted for fresh tires 23 laps from the end of the Spanish Grand Prix.
“It’s like Hungary all over again,” he said.
In 2019, Verstappen led for 67 of 70 laps at the Hungaroring, but not the ones that mattered most after Mercedes took a tire gamble and brought Hamilton in for a winning early second pit stop.
Photo: AFP
On Sunday, Verstappen seized the lead at the start, but ultimately lost out when the champions pulled off the same gambit.
When Hamilton re-emerged on track at Barcelona’s Circuit de Catalunya, the seven-time world champion asked his race engineer Peter Bonnington how far behind he was.
“Currently 22 seconds,” came the answer. “We’ve done it before.”
Hamilton, 14 points clear of his rival at the top after four close races, said he had been “really conflicted” about the strategy and could have ignored the call, but put his trust in the team.
“It was a long way to come back from some 20 odd seconds back, but it was a good gamble, a really great strategy from the team,” he said.
Verstappen said that there was little he could have done to change the outcome.
“I knew that as soon as they pitted that second time he would come back at me a bit like Hungary,” he said.
Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff complimented the team’s strategists back at the factory in England for crunching the numbers and running the computer simulations.
“They said: ‘In our planner if you were to stop now we would end up catching him one lap to the end and it would have a tire differential of 1.4 seconds and we believe that it is enough,’” the Austrian said.
“In the end, we trust them and we trust the data. This is really where the strategy team comes into play, saying the probability’s higher that we overtake him at the end of the race than now on a tire that is only five laps younger,” Wolff added.
The only miscalculation was that it took Hamilton fewer laps than expected.
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