Lewis Hamilton's shock early exit from Q1 at the Chinese GP left Mercedes searching for answers. But while technical director James Allison acknowledged a driver error by the Briton, he also attributed significant blame to the team itself.
The race weekend in Shanghai started promisingly for Hamilton. He excelled in the damp sprint qualifying, securing P2 on the grid and even led the early stages of the race before finishing runner-up to Red Bull’s Max Verstappen.
However, Saturday was a different story altogether for the seven-time world champion, a six-time winner in China, when he was left stranded a lowly P18 in Q1.
On his second flyer in the segment, Hamilton locked up as he entered Shanghai’s Turn 14 hairpin, which compromised his lap.
It was a “very uncharacteristic error” by the Mercedes driver, but also one that Allison felt should be shared by the team.
Firstly, he suggested that Mercedes should have perhaps provided Hamilton with a run plan for Q1 as optimized as the one followed by his teammate George Russell.
But more concerning was Allison's second point, when he admitted that Mercedes’ W15 is a challenging proposition for a driver, even for an ace like Hamilton, due to its inherent instability.
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“I was talking earlier on about this change to the rules, the two parc fermé rule which allows us another stab at setting up the car between the Sprint part of the weekend and the proper part of the weekend,” Allison explained in Mercedes' post-race debrief video on YouTube.
“I said this is a very welcome rule change but also a double-edged sword. If you make the wrong choices between the Sprint part of the weekend and the main event, you can end up making the car slower and suffer accordingly and although you get this opportunity to adjust the car, your first taste of the adjustments you’ve made are in qualifying, in Q1.
“So if you’ve chosen poorly then you will suffer and the first time you’ll know you’re suffering is when it really counts.
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“I would say – well I don’t need to guess about this because Lewis was absolutely explicit about it afterwards, he said he really wished he had taken the same approach that George had taken which was in his first run in Q1, George fuelled to do two timed laps so that he could have a feel of the car in the first flying lap, do a cool down lap and then have another bite at the cherry which would just give him more of a feel for the car.
“Whereas Lewis went later in the session, one timed lap, one timed lap and Lewis was very clear afterwards that he needed another lap.
“He’d found that the changes he’d made had made the car more understeery, they’d made it easier for the car to lock up under the braking and he was just pinching those front brakes in a way that was causing him difficulties.
“I think we all saw what happened on his second run, which was only his second timed lap therefore, running down the main straight into that bottom hairpin, he just got a little bit out of shape on the braking, went deep and that’s 0.7 of a second just there.
“That’s quite a big gap without which he would have easily got through to Q3 and whatever.”
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Allison readily cut Hamilton some slack, admitting that the Brackley squad should have supplied a less intricate car to its drivers to start with.
“So he would hold his hand up and say “my mistake, my error”,” he continued.
“I think we would be a little more rounded and say we should have actually encouraged more strongly that he was pursuing a programme a bit more like George’s.
“So that’s our mistake and we should frankly be making a car that is just not so tricky as the one we’ve got at the moment which is causing the drivers to make very uncharacteristic errors.
“We have two of the best drivers in the world and locking up at the end of a straight into a hairpin is not in Lewis’s recipe book and it’s a consequence of the car being too tricky.”
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