Lewis Hamilton proved there was a lot more speed in the Mercedes for Sunday’s race with his lightning-fast pace to set the fastest lap in the Mexican Grand Prix.
According to F1 pundit Peter Windsor, Hamilton’s spectacular last lap would have caused some snickers among his Mercedes teammates.
Following his sole career disqualification due to a technical issue in the US, Hamilton rebounded well in the Mexican race, finishing second behind Red Bull’s outstanding Max Verstappen after starting from sixth on the grid.
Could Lewis Hamilton have gone faster in Mexico?
Hamilton lit up the timing screens on the very final tour by registering a 1:21.334s – three tenths faster than Verstappen’s previous benchmark on Lap 40 – to snatch the bonus point for fastest lap.
Former title-winning Williams team manager Windsor was left surprised by Hamilton’s sudden turn of speed, suggesting that he could have gone faster much earlier in his final stint.
Speaking via his YouTube race roundup, he said: “Lewis set the fastest lap [and] that will have irritated Max a bit because he always loves to set fastest lap and, at that point, he had it – and Lewis set it on the last lap.
“That brought a smile obviously to everybody’s face in the Mercedes garage – and certainly Lewis enjoyed that – but it was a weird thing.
“This is Lewis looking after the tyres and going a little bit slower than Max virtually everywhere, apart from one [lap] – and on the last lap he does a 21.3!
“It’s a cliché to say: ‘Well, where did that come from?’ – but it has to be asked because I suppose you would say in the debrief afterwards when it’s all quiet: ‘21.3, Lewis! What were you doing [for the rest of the race]?’
“Of course, he would say: ‘Well, I wouldn’t have been able to do that 21.3 unless I’d been looking after the tyres the way I had in the previous 10-12 laps’ – and that probably is the correct answer.
“But it’s an interesting one, isn’t it, how quick he was? But then again, I suppose we don’t know how quick Max would have been if he’d had to respond to that 21.3. As it was, he had no chance because it was on the last lap of the race.
So it was a little bit of an unanswered question there [and] I suppose this is the way to put it: if Lewis had known that the tyres were going to last to the point where he could do a 21.3 on the last lap, how much quicker would he have driven – how much more would he have pushed the tyres – over the previous 12 laps?
“That’s an interesting question. Of course, he doesn’t know the answer [and] it’s purely hypothetical, because he never would know how long the tyres are going to last. It was always a question mark if those mediums were going to go away.
Lewis had the fastest lap to his credit and came in second place, over 14 seconds behind Max, with no problems in the parc ferme! Having won at least one race in each of his first 15 years in Formula One starting in 2007, Hamilton is getting closer to having a second straight winless season with just three events left in 2023.
His last triumph came in Saudi Arabia at the penultimate round of the 2021 season, seven days before Verstappen deposed him under extremely contentious conditions in Abu Dhabi.