Why Ferrari insisted on pit stop despite Hamilton's objection: The Scuderia explains!

At the Austrian Grand Prix, every frontrunner completed a two-stop race. Hamilton was called into the pit lane on Lap 51, a lap after Leclerc switched his tyres.

Over the team radio, the British driver wanted to extend his stint, in order to do something different strategically. "Is my pace really bad, because tyres are fine," the seven-time world champion asked.

After Riccardo Adami said for the 'optimal race' a pit stop is needed, Hamilton asked again: "My tyres are OK, can I extend? How many more laps left?" The Italian race engineer confirmed the lap count to the driver.

After the race, Ferrari's deputy team principal Jerome d'Ambrosio, who had to stand in for Frederic Vasseur this weekend, reflected on the incident to GPblog among others

"I think it was more a question of a matter of setting, so staying a few more laps. In the end you know it's nothing out of the norm. What we tried to do as a team was to and Austria is very much like that, you try to do your optimal strategy so you try to optimize your race time and that's what we did with both drivers," the Belgian began.

As a former F1 driver, D'Ambrosio also understands how Hamilton felt in the car. "From a driver's perspective you question always ‘is it the best, is it the best for, can we do something else?’ They are racers they are Formula 1 driver, that's what they should do and that's what they do."

"In the end [I] just saw Lewis now and you look at the numbers and yeah, that's what made sense," he concluded.