© LAT Images for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd
Mercedes’ Technical Director James Allison says “locking up at the end of a straight into a hairpin is not in Lewis’s recipe book and it’s a consequence of the car being too tricky”.
The new Formula 1 Sprint weekend rules allow for teams to change their cars’ set-ups after the Sprint Race, and before the start of Qualifying for the main race.
Mercedes’ Technical Director James Allison explains this means that the teams will learn what their changes did only when their cars are already in Q1.
“The two parc ferme rule, which allows us another stab at setting up the car between the Sprint part of the weekend and the proper part of the weekend, I said this is a very welcome rule change but also a double-edged sword,” the Briton said.
“If you make the wrong choices between the Sprint part of the weekend and the main event, you can end up making the car slower and suffer accordingly and although you get this opportunity to adjust the car, your first taste of the adjustments you’ve made are in qualifying, in Q1.
“So if you’ve chosen poorly then you will suffer and the first time you’ll know you’re suffering is when it really counts.”
After Lewis Hamilton finished the Chinese Grand Prix Sprint Race in P2, he shockingly got eliminated in Q1 of Qualifying. This was a result of the set-up change done between the sessions.
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Allison says it is now obvious that replicating George Russell’s Quali run plan would have been a better option for Lewis.
“I would say, well I don’t need to guess about this because Lewis was absolutely explicit about it afterwards, he said he really wished he had taken the same approach that George had taken.
“Which was, in his first run in Q1 George fuelled to do two timed laps so that he could have a feel of the car in the first flying lap, do a cool-down lap and then have another bite at the cherry which would just give him more of a feel for the car.
“Whereas Lewis went later in the session, one timed lap, and Lewis was very clear afterwards that he needed another lap.
“He’d found that the changes he’d made had made the car more understeery, they’d made it easier for the car to lock up under the braking and he was just pinching those front brakes in a way that was causing him difficulties.
“I think we all saw what happened on his second run, which was only his second timed lap, therefore running down the main straight into that bottom hairpin, he just got a little bit out of shape on the braking, went deep and that’s 0.7 of a second just there.
“That’s quite a big gap without which he would have easily got through to Q3 and whatever.”
Ultimately, James says Mercedes is taking the blame for that Q1 ‘error’ in Lewis’ final timed run.
“So he [Hamilton] would hold his hand up and say ‘my mistake, my error’.
“I think we would be a little more rounded and say we should have actually encouraged more strongly that he was pursuing a programme a bit more like George’s, so that’s our mistake.
“And we should frankly be making a car that is just not so tricky as the one we’ve got at the moment, which is causing the drivers to make very uncharacteristic errors.
“We have two of the best drivers in the world and locking up at the end of a straight into a hairpin is not in Lewis’s recipe book and it’s a consequence of the car being too tricky,” Allison concluded.
