Mercedes Formula 1 team technical director James Allison admits that the strategy deployed on Lewis Hamilton’s car in the Singapore GP was “a clear mistake.”
Hamilton was the only frontrunner to start on the soft rather than medium tyres, with the general idea that they might help him get a better start and possibly challenge Lando Norris and Max Verstappen up ahead.
However he stayed in third place at the start, and also found the softs losing performance earlier than had been predicted. After an early stop he was left with a long run to the flag and an eventual sixth place.
Hamilton made his frustration clear on team radio, while after the race his boss Toto Wolff admitted that it had been a “painful evening” for the Brackley team.
“We shouldn’t have started on the softs,” said Allison. “That was a mistake. If we could turn back time, we would do what those around us did and select the mediums.
“The reasoning was that the soft tyre very often allows you to get away from the start abruptly and allows you a good chance of jumping a place or two in the opening laps of the race.
“We had no real expectation before the race that we were going to suffer the sort of difficulties that we then experienced on the soft rubber. We imagined we would get the upside of the soft rubber, of getting a place or two. We didn’t, because that just isn’t the way the start played out.
“And then we hoped that the downside of the soft being a bit more fragile wouldn’t really play out particularly badly because on the whole, if you look back over the years in Singapore, on the whole the pace starts very, very easy at a Singapore race, and the drivers then build up the pace over many, many laps, leaving a soft tyre perfectly okay to run relatively deep into the pit window.
“So we didn’t get the places at the start, the pace started building up from around about lap five and that left Lewis with a car that was not particularly happy anyway, suffering from quite poor tyre degradation and needing to come in early as a consequence and really ruined his race for him. So just a clear mistake.”
Allison admitted that a strong qualifying session in Singapore was an “anomaly”, sandwiched by a poor Friday and a difficult race.
“I think Sunday’s result was pretty difficult for the team and Friday was signalling some of maybe what we might have expected by way of difficulty,” he said.
“The anomaly really was Saturday where we managed to get from a difficult Friday to a pretty creditable grid position and there we have to give great credit to the team back at the factory who really did help turn around a difficult Friday, put us much further up the grid than Friday might have suggested and give us a result that while disappointing was not disastrous as a consequence.
“I would say that probably the trade we made, although unwittingly, was that we improved the car for a single lap for qualifying but it was quite a painful thing then on long runs.”
Allison stressed that the W15 doesn’t like hot track temperatures: “We suffered again from a thing that has been problematic for us which is on softer rubber at tracks where tyre temperature is at a premium, where it’s very easy to overheat, we lose relative competitiveness and Singapore is at the extreme end of that experience and it was quite a difficult thing for them to manage.”
He also confirmed that address the temperature issue is one of the key targets of ther coming weeks as the team prepares its Austin upgrade package.
“We’ll be trying to figure out how to mitigate what ailed us this weekend, how to figure out how to make the tyres run better on these sort of overheating circuits, and we’ll be also doing quite a lot of work to bring our last upgrade of the season together.
“We’ve got a fairly substantial set of new clothes for the car coming for Austin that we hope will give us a decent weekend there. So we’ve got to deliver all that and get ourselves ready for these last few races of the year.”
