Toto Wolff says Lewis Hamilton was over-cautious managing his tyres during the Hungarian Grand Prix, leading to radio messages telling him to pick up the pace.
Hamilton was leading after the first round of pit stops but said he was struggling for pace having fitted soft tyres. With team-mate Nico Rosberg getting within two seconds, Daniel Ricciardo and Sebastian Vettel were also closing in on the two Mercedes at that stage of the race and Hamilton was told to improve his pace or risk losing out on the best time to pit as the team would need to protect Rosberg from a threat behind.
Hamilton did speed up in response and Wolff doesn't believe the defending champion was aware of how close the drivers behind were getting.
"I don’t think he was backing [Rosberg] up at all, I think he was really cautious in managing the tyres and this is what he said," Wolff said. "These tyres need to go a long way and what he was saying on the radio was that he was ‘driving to the best of my abilities’, that doesn’t mean ‘I’m driving as fast as I can’ and I think we needed to make it clear to him that we were running into a problem.
"Sometimes as a driver you must not forget you are sitting in the car out there, you are managing the pace. You don’t see what is standing out around you, you just need to trust the pit wall and I guess at that particular moment we needed to make the message come across and this is what we did.
"We said, and the seriousness of the message was, you can either say that we are going to reverse the cars like we did in Monaco if you don’t pick up the pace, or, we might pit Nico earlier and I think that message was what he needed. What he needed to understand was that the pace needed to be picked up."
REPORT: Hamilton holds off Rosberg to take championship lead
AS IT HAPPENED: Hungarian Grand Prix
Silbermann says ... Birds on the wire
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