Red Bull outplayed Mercedes on strategy in Monaco: 'They did that on purpose'

In recent years Red Bull have traditionally been the fastest car at Monaco. In 2021, the team from Austria once again showed that they have the fastest car in the principality. Mercedes, on the other hand, had a poor weekend and with a DNF and a seventh place. In the debrief from Mercedes, James Vowles explains how they experienced the race from the pit wall.

"On Sunday morning we calculated  that lap 30 would be late to stop. That was created on purpose by Red Bull and Verstappen, they managed to drive away right away, but then controlled the gap," Vowles explained. With the gap never really widening, none of the teams were able to pull off a good undercut. But by lap 30, the gap was widening.

Undercut failed

"As a result, nobody in the field really had a gap to go in earlier. In Valtteri's case he had Vettel and Perez behind him in his pit window. As a result, we couldn't go in. As we got towards lap 30, those gaps got a bit bigger. That's not early as in 2019, we stopped on the tenth lap during the safety car and then drove on to the end.

"If you look at Gasly, we were behind him the whole race. Clearly we couldn't overtake him on the track. Our calculations showed we could do the undercut. It wasn't easy, but it was doable."

However, Pierre Gasly and AlphaTauri managed to perform an overcut on the reigning world champions, allowing not only Gasly, but also Sebastian Vettel and Sergio Perez to pass Hamilton.

According to Vowles, it was due to the lack of data in Monaco, also because they had not driven in Monaco in 2020. "The problem though was that we didn't have much data on the hardest tyre. We ended up two tenths behind Gasly on the track because it was so difficult to warm up the hardest tyre."