Lewis Hamilton had to let teammate Valtteri Bottas past him in Austria. However, it took Mercedes a while to decide to tie this knot, but Andrew Shovlin explains why.
Hamilton sustained damage to his car around the pit stop time, losing six to seven-tenths a lap. Bottas and Norris were closing in fast, and so Mercedes had to act. First Bottas was asked to keep his position, then he was allowed to race Lewis, and in the end the spot was given to him. How did this actually work?
Mercedes waits for Norris
"Once we diagnosed the problem on Hamilton's car, we were seeing where his lap times actually stabilised. But it came clear early on that he would find it impossible to defend against Lando Norris behind. We were worried that Valtteri Bottas would be vulnerable in the middle of this fight," says Andrew Shovlin in the Debrief from Mercedes.
However, Mercedes seemed to wait a long time with the call to let Bottas pass, but Shovlin denies that. ''We waited for the moment when Norris was close enough to where he was a risk to Valtteri, and that triggered our decision to invert the order. The moment we really understood the damage, we concluded early on that holding on to third place was almost impossible," the Mercedes engineer concluded.