© Steve Etherington for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
Lewis Hamilton says he wasn’t “a huge amount” confident that he could close the 20-something second gap to Max Verstappen after his second pit stop at the Spanish Grand Prix.
While Hamilton was trailing Verstappen at the Spanish Grand Prix, Mercedes decided to pit the Briton on Lap 42 of 66, to give him a chance to hunt Max down on fresher tyres.
It meant that Lewis was going to have to make up for around 23 seconds and overtake the Dutch driver in only 18 laps. Even he was worried when he was called in, and he proceeded to ask his race engineer Peter Bonnington – Bono what the gap was going to be when he comes out.
“22 seconds, we’ve done it before,” said Bono matter-of-factly.
Bonnington was referring to the 2019 Hungarian Grand Prix, when Hamilton tracked down and overtook Verstappen on Lap 67 of 70, after pitting for the second time and taking a similar tyre gamble.
At the post race press conference Lewis was asked if he was confident that he could make up these 20-odd seconds and overtake Verstappen in the final laps of the race.
“Not a huge amount,” the Briton said.
“It was really interesting because all weekend, a one-stop strategy was the quickest way to the end of the race but this is one of the most abrasive circuits that we go to in terms of how aggressive it is with the tyres.
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“It isn’t easy to make these tyres go that distance – even when the track was a lot cooler this weekend than perhaps it was last year here, and compared to how it was yesterday.
“All these little details have an affect on how these tyres last – but still, it is a really challenging circuit to save them and make them go the distance.
“So, I think it was quite clear early on to me, particularly of how close I was pushing to keep within a second, or just over a second behind Max.
“I knew that I was going to a two-stop strategy and then the team told me and I was like: ‘nothing new’.
“Of course, when I came out 20-odd seconds behind, I thought that’s going to be… it seemed so far, it’s such a huge gap to close but when you see the time difference that we had.
“I was in the mid-20s and he was mid-22s, or sometimes late 22s. I had plenty of laps to catch-up, but I didn’t know whether or not I would have enough pace at the end tyre-wise.
“But then you just have to offset: he’s going to have even worse pace at the end.
“It was, as I said, the perfect strategy,” concluded the seven-time champion.
