Mercedes technical chief James Allison acknowledged that starting Lewis Hamilton on the soft tires was a “clear mistake” at the Singapore Grand Prix.
Hamilton was the only driver in the top 10 to choose softer tires for the start of Sunday’s race at the Marina Bay Street Circuit. The seven-time world champion was unable to secure a spot at the start despite passing Max Verstappen entering Turn 1.Hamilton’s pace was poor from that point on, and he eventually had to pit on lap 17.
This proved to be too early, as he was overtaken by teammate George Russell, and ultimately defeated by Oscar Piastri and Charles Leclerc. Hamilton had previously expressed his disapproval of the strategy at an event sponsored by Petronas after the Singapore GP. Allison gave an explanation of Mercedes’ reasoning for starting with the softs in a video posted on Mercedes’ YouTube channel.
“Before I give the explanation, I will just say: we shouldn’t have started on the softs, that was a mistake,” she said.”We imagined we would get the upside of the soft rubber, of getting a place or two. We didn’t because that is the way the starts played out.
We hoped that the downside of the soft being a bit more fragile wouldn’t play out particularly badly because on the whole if you look back over the years in Singapore, it’s not uncommon to get away from the start abruptly and to have a good chance of jumping a place or two in the opening laps of the race.
Lewis had a vehicle that wasn’t very pleased because of fairly terrible degradation, so he had to come in early since we didn’t get the spot at the start. The pace started to pick up about lap five. He felt like it completely wrecked his race. An obvious error.
