Mercedes think Ferrari were too fast at Monza: 'Best we could'

Mercedes engineer Andrew Shovlin looks back on the Italian Grand Prix in his own Race Debrief. According to the Briton, Ferrari's men were simply too fast to beat. Shovlin also thinks the team got lucky with Lewis Hamilton's incident with Oscar Piastri.

The German racing stable chose to have Hamilton start on the hard tyre. The team hoped this would make it easier for the seven-time world champion to overtake others:"Lewis's entire strategy on the Hard tyre was about generating that difference in tyre age to the other cars. We were able to run him longer, and he was then on a fresh Medium at the end of the race when all the other cars, the McLarens, the Williams, Alonso were on their older Hard tyres. That was enough to generate the overtaking delta that he was able to get through."

'Got lucky with Hamilton'

In his way to the front, the British driver pushed McLaren driver Oscar Piastri off the track. The Australian suffered a broken floor and had to have his front wing replaced, while Hamilton was able to continue his catch-up. Other than a five-second time penalty, the Mercedes driver suffered no damage. "We were quite lucky because the contact was all on the wheel rim and the tyre. There is a little bit of damage to the rim, there is a little bit of damage to the wheel cover on it, but nothing that would have affected the performance of the car."

On the podium in Singapore?

George Russell had a strong qualifying session and got to start fourth. After 51 laps, he crossed the line in fifth. According to Shovlin, the Ferraris were out of the running. "Fundamentally in the race though we didn’t quite have the pace and it seems that when we go to the low downforce settings, Ferrari get more competitive. In Monza, it looked like that they had one and a half to two and a half tenths of performance on us. When you've got that kind of advantage it's very difficult to challenge anyone on strategy. Ultimately the best that we could have achieved was the P5 with George behind the pair of Ferraris."

The engineer looks forward to the Singapore Grand Prix with great confidence: "There is a reason to think that the car will work better and that is because Singapore is a maximum downforce circuit. Our performance at the high downforce tracks like at Barcelona, Budapest, and even Zandvoort the car was working well, and we've had pretty strong performance. We’re hoping to be able to be a bit quicker there and get back to a position where we can challenge for podiums."