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Hearts are breaking in the Mercedes camp after a bizarre pit strategy denied Lewis Hamilton victory at the Monaco Grand Prix.
Hamilton was poised to dominate the weekend after taking pole position and leading comfortably, but in the end it was his lead that cost him victory when a late safety car deployment triggered the team to pit Hamilton for fresh tyres.
In the end the gap between the front runners wasn’t as sizeable as they thought, and rather than emerge in the lead he found himself in third behind teammate Nico Rosberg and Sebastian Vettel, stunning the audience at the track and notably on social media.
The mistake handed Rosberg his third successive victory in Monaco, a feat that no other driver without a championship has achieved.
“I’m sorry to him that we messed it up. It was the wrong decision (to pit him),” said Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff. “We can only apologise, apologise and apologise again. We calculated the gaps wrong. It was Lewis’ victory. And he has every reason to be angry.”
It was the second race this year where the decision to pit under the safety car has cost Mercedes and Hamilton. On lap 4 of the Malaysian Grand Prix both Hamilton and Rosberg took service behind the safety car, only for the pair to follow Sebastian Vettel’s Ferrari around for the rest of the afternoon.
It was hoped that winning both the drivers’ and constructors’ championships last year would be a monkey off their backs after a turbulent season with drivers tripping over each other at numerous races and being plagued by technical gremlins.
Instead the team has lacked focus and conviction, and it’s not only the fans that are questioning the credibility of Mercedes’ engineers with Sky F1 reporter Ted Kravitz asking, perhaps melodramatically, “How can Hamilton trust a call from the team ever again?”
Fans took to social media to vent their frustration with the result and the timing couldn’t have been worse on two fronts.
Not only is Monaco one of Lewis Hamilton’s favourite tracks, but it’s his home. He spent most of the 24 hours between qualifying and race saying how special it was to him and his affinity for it. It also doesn’t help that only days earlier the team had signed a new three-year partnership with Lewis worth €100 million.
To complicate matters further it was this race last year that temporarily derailed Hamilton’s championship charge. A victory here would have rectified the perceived wrong-doing of 2014, instead his frustration is only amplified.
Additionally, the Monaco race was supposed to launch a new era for Formula One. Two major fan surveys were launched last week to determine where the sport has gone wrong in recent years in an attempt to seduce fans back to the track. Both ask the respondents where they think the sport has gone wrong and gauges their interest in proposed regulation changes, including the reintroduction of refueling, changes to the qualifying format and even the ludicrous prospect of reverse grids.
Formula One is far from dead, but it sure has a smell about it with the speed and noise of the cars being identified as one of the possible reasons for fans are turning away.
During the pre-race drivers’ press conference Fernando Alonso reiterated this sentiment saying, “We cannot run one second quicker than GP2 cars because the grandstands are empty.”
Columnist and analysts sometimes spend too much time dreaming up hypotheticals, but I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Hamilton had managed to get a run on Vettel through the tunnel and screamed up the inside coming in to the Nouvelle chicane. Would the team have asked Rosberg to move aside and let Hamilton through, and if they did… what would his response have been?
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