F1
Monday, October 25, 2021, 09:39
author: Tamas Balogh Photo: Daimler Media
The main track engineer in the defending booth already feels he could have won Austin with a more aggressive strategy. Andrew Shovlin also talked about where their advantage went in the first exercise.
Although Lewis Hamilton initially took the lead, he eventually had to finish second in the Formula 1 Grand Prix of the USA behind Max Verstappen. The Dutchman took the lead after the first wheel changes, with his Mercedes rival standing still after a few laps, and then the Briton extended the second stage further so he could dash on newer tires at the end. He did, but couldn’t come close to beating his World Cup rival, who doubled his points lead in the boat.
Team captain Toto Wolff assessed after Sunday’s events that victory was available to them in Austin, as did Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ chief track engineer: the specialist will then see that the first wheel change will happen sooner than Verstappene (Dutch) has popped up at the end of the course tenth), first place was available – only at the start of the race, judging by the speed seen in the middle group, they feared that the seven-time world champion wouldn’t get enough rubber at the end due to an early boxing hiatus.
“Realistically, the chance of winning would have been if we’d kept the leadership Lewis gained by standing up early to change the wheels,” said Shovlin, quoted by RaceFans.net. “But given that we struggled with the mid-vehicle tyres, we wouldn’t be brave enough to do that just to keep driving. We felt we would have spoiled our entire race with this. But now I think if we had excelled earlier we could have hit our target. But if We pulled the trigger first, we could only hope for the best if Lewis was able to keep Max behind.”
Mercedes’ defeat may have been unexpected because they have always been good at COTA in the hybrid era, plus they still had almost a second advantage in Friday’s first free practice. However, that superiority had vanished, and Shovlin admitted they might be a little too confident – even though they knew they didn’t have a forum as much as the results showed:
“We drew really well and to be honest, we really thought we were in great shape. At the same time, we knew we shut down the engines enough at the time, so we knew our advantage was good. We also saw that Max wasn’t able to Have a good trip: Got in a lot of trouble with traffic and more. So maybe too much… Not an optimistic good word, but we thought we got off to a good start to the weekend.” What we saw from the second free practice gave A clearer picture of where our pace actually is. It wasn’t that we made bad decisions about the settings, but as the weather got hotter and the wind got stronger, we experienced better. But the image we saw on FP2 also came back on Saturday and Sunday, and that was the real benchmark.”
If you want to recommend this article to your friends, you can do so using the following buttons:
