Mercedes: Bottas paved the way for Hamilton inter tyre switch

Mercedes says Valtteri Bottas' early switch to the intermediate tyre in the closing stages of the Russian Grand Prix gave the team all the information it needed to bring in Lewis Hamilton.

McLaren's Lando Norris looked set to enjoy a sensational maiden F1 win in Sochi when a late downpour wreaked havoc on the young Briton's race.

With only a handful of laps to go, Norris opted to remain on the slick tyres amid the worsening conditions while Hamilton, encouraged by Mercedes' strategists, elected to switch to the inters.

The crucial decision handed the seven-time world champion his milestone 100th F1 triumph, while Norris was left to ponder what might have been.

Mercedes' head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin said the team had partly owed its success to its decision to pit Bottas early which offered it an opportunity to gauge the performance and behaviour of the intermediate tyre as the rain blew in.

"The key to it was how you were interpreting the weather forecast," explained Shovlin. "As you know, all the teams, we've got the same rain radar, we could see the rain coming in, and we could see that it was going to start light.

"What we could see was that it was then going to get heavier. And that was really the thing that we were reacting to.

"But, in some ways, our decision making was helped by the fact that Valtteri was out of the points and he had nothing to lose: so we were the first to make the jump.

"Then seeing how the tyres were working on his car we followed suit with Lewis soon after. And certainly not leading the race makes it a bit easier to take those decisions."

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As Norris gambled on staying the course for the remaining few laps, Hamilton initially agreed with the McLaren driver's call, having chosen to ignore a first command to stop from the Mercedes pitwall.

But the Briton was eventually convinced by his race engineer to trust his team's information and to take his cue from title rival Max Verstappen who was in he pits.

"The key point that we were thinking to get across to him was that Max had stopped," added Shovlin.

"With Max having stopped, then he's certainly keen that we shadow what he's doing, even if it meant that we might leave the door open for Lando to take the win.

"And the other thing we just had to get across was that we thought the rain was going to get heavier. Therefore jumping early was going to be better.

"So it's just with all these things, it's very much a case of getting the right information to the driver, because we were quite clear what we wanted to do.

"They haven't got the luxury of rain radars and things like that, so it’s just a case of making sure that they can understand why it is we're trying to take that decision."

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