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Hamilton surprised by poor team performance from Mercedes
Lewis Hamilton says Mercedes lost a lot of points through its own team performance at the Monaco Grand Prix after he finished seventh.
Arriving as the championship leader, Hamilton struggled somewhat on Thursday in practice and things didn’t improve in qualifying as he ended up seventh on the grid. That soon became sixth because of Charles Leclerc’s failure to start, but Mercedes then lost out on strategy with Sebastian Vettel and Sergio Perez both jumping Hamilton to leave him seventh at the flag.
“(It was) dull, but Monaco really always is -- no matter what position I’m in, if I’m really honest,” Hamilton said. “It’s not a fun race because you’re just following people; you can’t overtake them. So even when you’re in the lead... honestly I’ve sat in the lead and of course it’s a great feeling to win, but the race is actually really, really boring and you’re just doing the same thing 78 times.
“But we lost a lot of points today for a really, really poor performance from the team, and definitely a little bit surprised by it. But these things are sent to try us.”
Hamilton says Mercedes will need to have some serious investigations into the way it tackled the Monaco weekend after losing the lead in both the drivers’ and constructors’ championships.
“It’s all we can do. We’ll look internally, have some good discussions and try and come back stronger the next race. We obviously have some weak points with our car, and this race and the next race (Baku) will be just as tough I think. For us, at this cold circuit, it’s really hard to get the tires working, so we’ve got a good battle on our hands.”
Team principal Toto Wolff explained that Hamilton’s strategy didn’t work out because AlphaTauri's Pierre Gasly was able to show enough pace on his in-lap to hold off the Mercedes.
“Yeah, the strategy was the pretty obvious one,” Wolff said. "He (Hamilton) said on the radio, ‘Are we undercutting?’ We felt the undercut was the right thing to do in order to pass Gasly. That’s what we did -- the stop was good, the out-lap was good but he was just a second and a half ahead, and he maintained that gap.
"We thought that 1.5s would be enough with the out-lap, but it wasn’t.”
Chris Medland
While studying Sports Journalism at the University of Central Lancashire, Chris managed to talk his way into working at the British Grand Prix in 2008 and was retained for three years before joining ESPN F1 as Assistant Editor. After three further years at ESPN, a spell as F1 Editor at Crash Media Group was followed by the major task of launching F1i.com’s English-language website and running it as Editor. Present at every race since the start of 2014, he has continued building his freelance portfolio, working with international titles. As well as writing for RACER, his broadcast work includes television appearances on F1 TV and as a presenter and reporter on North America's live radio coverage on SiriusXM.
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