© Wolfgang Wilhelm for Daimler AG
Mercedes Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin says he believes Lewis Hamilton could have overtaken Max Verstappen at the Spanish Grand Prix even without Mercedes’ strategy call.
On Lap 42 of the Spanish Grand Prix, just as Lewis Hamilton was preparing to attack Max Verstappen on track, Mercedes called him in for his second pit stop.
The decision was made to allow Lewis to catch up to and overtake Max on fresher tyres, which he did beautifully.
In Mercedes’ race debrief video, Andrew Shovlin says he believes Lewis would have overtaken Max even without the extra pit stop.
“He actually said to us after the race: ’I was almost about to do it. Perhaps you should have left me out and I would have done it on track’,” said Shovlin.
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“And it looked like it was quite possible, I think with fresher tires on Lewis’ car, it would probably happened at some point, because Max would’ve started to get pretty significant degradation towards the end of the race.
“However, if we’ve done that, you then have the disadvantage almost of being the race leader and Max could have done to Lewis what we’ve done to him.
“So he could’ve converted to a two-stop as soon as Lewis had overtaken him. This might have happened around the point we decided to pull the trigger on the extra stop anyway.
“So in some ways, it was actually better to not do that overtake on track,” the Briton concluded.
