Mercedes: Issue on Hamilton's car thwarted FP1 set-up plans in Baku

Mercedes says an unexpected issue on Lewis Hamilton's car in Baku ahead of FP1 derailed the team's comparasion set-up programme, which may have impacted its race weekend.

The introduction in Azerbaijan of a new Sprint format left teams and drivers with just a single practice session to refine the baseline settings of their car.

Mercedes opted to run in free practice two different set-ups on Hamilton and teammate George Russell's W14 to compare and select the most efficient option for the remainder of the weekend.

But that plan was thwarted at the last minute by a technical problem on Hamilton's car as Mercedes chief technical officer Mike Elliott explained in the team's post-race Q&A on YouTube.

"You’ve only got one one-hour session of FP1 to get the car right," he said. "And that’s on a circuit that has been resurfaced.

"So how the tyres are going to work and interact with that surface is different to what we might have expected.

"We turned up having a set-up we were going to try with Lewis and a set-up we were going to try with George.

"What happened to us is, we had an issue with Lewis’ car getting it out of the garage on time, because of a parameter in the car.

"And as a consequence of that it made it very difficult to compare those two set-ups."

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Elliott says circumstances forced Mercedes to make a call on the set-up of its W14 that may not have been its optimal choice.

"I think in hindsight, we’re still not convinced of whether we made the right choice or didn’t make the right choice," added the Briton.

"It’s the same for everybody. Everybody has got that same format to deal with, everybody has got that same challenge of one hour to deal with."

Hamilton went on to finish the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in P6, but there were suggestions after the race that the Briton could have perhaps fought for the final spot on the podium had he pitted – like Aston Martin's Fernando Alonso – under the Safety Car instead of just before.

Elliott addressed that hypothesis.

"In our case we pitted Lewis, the safety Car came out afterwards and as a consequence of that, Lewis lost out," Elliott explained.

"He lost out because it's obviously a lot cheaper to take a pit stop when the safety Car is out, you lose less time in the pitlane, relatively.

"So, if we had pitted under the Safety Car, we would have come out behind the two Red Bulls and behind the two Ferraris, and we would have been racing from there.

"Maybe we could have overtaken Sainz, that's what we saw Alonso do from that same position but I think that getting on the podium would have been tough.

"We saw from this race it's very difficult to overtake without a big pace differential, wo I think the podium would have been tough, but we would have finished in a better place."

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