Mercedes unhappy with strategy choices: 'Afraid Verstappen would do this'

Looking back on a Grand Prix-weekend in which defending champions Mercedes didn't live up to their own high expectations, Andrew Shovlin explains the controversial decision to bring Lewis Hamilton in for an early second pitstop. He saw his team embroiled in a situation with no real solution.

"The basic problem was that if we left it later and later, at some point, Verstappen was going to stop anyway. So you would lose the ability to attempt an undercut", Shovlin explained in the usual strategy debrief from Mercedes.

Continuing, he also sees problems on the other side of the coin: "If we brought it earlier and earlier the risk is that Lewis would have run out of tyres by the end of the race, and you can’t mount any kind of credible challenge. "

Afterthought

"That was the reason we knew we were gonna have to drop into backmarker traffic", the strategic director is aware. " It’s fair to say that we did lose quite a critical chunk of time." Still plenty to talk about at Mercedes, that much is certain.