Why Mercedes asked Lewis Hamilton about his Miami Grand Prix strategy

Mercedes have explained their reasoning for the pit stop strategy question in Miami that mystified Lewis Hamilton.

The seven-time former World Champion was perplexed both during and after the inaugural Miami Grand Prix as to why his team had asked him to make a call on whether he should ‘box’ behind the Safety Car for a second set of new tyres.

In a post-race interview, Hamilton, who went on to finish sixth, one place behind his team-mate George Russell, said: “In that scenario I have no clue where everyone is, so when the team say it’s your choice I don’t have the information to make the decision.

“That’s what your job is, make the decision for me – you’ve got all the details, I don’t. That’s what you rely on the guys for but today they gave it to me and I don’t understand it, but anyways…”

Silver Arrows side-by-side in Miami ⚔️ Fun battle between Lewis and George last Sunday 👊pic.twitter.com/bZ8jjuG5Ns

— Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team (@MercedesAMGF1) May 10, 2022

Team principal Toto Wolff subsequently said Hamilton’s strategy had been “between a rock and a hard place” and described it as a “50-50” decision – and in Mercedes’ post-race debrief, technical director Mike Elliott backed up that assessment, saying there had been simply no obvious “right or wrong answer”.

“The Virtual Safety Car came first and we pitted George, exactly the right thing to do,” said Elliott, referring to it being Russell’s only stop of the race as he had run on his original set of hard tyres up to that point.

“We were then in this position where we would have had quite a big gap between Valtteri [Bottas], closely followed by Lewis, with George a chunk behind.

“At that stage of the race, with both Valtteri and Lewis on hard tyres, Lewis was closing into the back of Valtteri and was going to have a chance to overtake on track for a normal racing pass, and that’s what we expected the race to sort of pan out.

“But that…