Mercedes proved unable to come up with an answer to Max Verstappen's dominant dorm in today's Dutch Grand Prix at Circuit Zandvoort.
The Red Bull driver had narrowly claimed pole position for the race, but team principal Toto Wolff had been banking on Mercedes having two drivers in the top three on the grid enabling them to dictate the race strategy.
But a perfect start for Verstappen allowed the Red Bull driver to pull out an early lead over Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas, with Verstappen then content to shadow Hamilton's pit stops.
"We had I think a sniff of an undercut there,” Wolff told Sky Sports f1 after the race. "We didn't time it right. I mean, at the end you're always more clever.
"When you have the quickest car on track, whatever you try on strategy is difficult," he continued.
Hamilton made his first stop on lap 21 with Verstappen in a lap later. The world champion then made a second stop on lap 40 for another set of medium tyres; while Verstappen again came in one lap later, he opted for the hard compound to Mercedes' surprise.
“We didn't expect them to go on the hard tyre because it was an unknown," Wolff admitted. "We didn't drive the hard tyre on the Friday.
"The hard tyre was a bit of a gamble,” he insisted. “You could have seen on the Ferraris that it was going well, but it was unknown territory because none of us had really run it. We didn't run it, at least.”
"We thought we might be pushing them early with the soft, but it is what it is," he added.
While the medium compound allowed Hamilton to close up to the race leader, the less durable rubber meant he started to fall back in the closing laps. Wolff acknowledged that there had been nothing more Mercedes could do on the day.
"Credit to him, credit to Red Bull, they were faultless today," he said. "It's so close together and here Max was the quickest.
"It's his home track, But Monza is going to maybe be a different environment and we believe we're still in the running for the championship."
With the race lead now out of the question, Hamilton had pitted for a third time just before the finish for a fresh set of tyres to clinch the bonus for fastest lap.
Bottas had been working on a single stop strategy but Wolff said this was never likely to work out for the team.
"His tyres were shot. We couldn't hold [Verstappen] back, a one-stop was then never on the books."
Bottas subsequently made a late switch to the soft compound, but was told not to use the opportunity to go for the bonus - an instruction he initially seemed to ignore until backing off in the final sector, although he still set the quickest time up to that point. Fortunately Hamilton's final push proved to be a whopping 1.452s quicker.
“He was backing off,” Wolff said when asked about Bottas' seemingly ignoring team orders. "We just wanted to make sure that it was not happening.
"That's why we re-emphasised politely on the lap, and then he backed off," he added.
For his part, Bottas stated there was never any expectation that he would take the bonus point: "I knew Lewis was going to stop as well, that information I had, and I knew that with a decent amount of lifting in the last sector, he would get it,” he said. “So no drama.”
And Hamilton was sanguine about the whole issue. “If Valtteri had got it, that would have been fine," he stated. “At the end of the day we needed to get the fastest lap, as many points as we can as a team.
"If Valtteri gets it or I get it, it doesn’t really make a huge difference," he said. “I didn’t even know that Valtteri had stopped, I was completely unaware of that. It was my choice to stop, I needed that extra point, so I did, and it’s fine.”
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