Lewis Hamilton believes his former team McLaren squandered their chance to win the Italian Grand Prix by putting their drivers on two-stop strategies.
McLaren locked out the front row of the grid for today’s race but Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc split their two drivers at the start. While both McLaren drivers pitted twice, Leclerc only came in once, and took the chequered flag first.
Hamilton is convinced McLaren could have made a success of Leclerc’s winning strategy. “Looking at the race trace, I think McLaren had the pace, they just pushed too hard,” he told Sky. “They were doing much too fast laps early on and killed their tyres.”
He believes McLaren’s strategists were too hesitant to consider alternatives to two pit stops. “I guess they literally had planned for a two-stop,” said Hamilton. “That’s why they were pushing so hard.
“If they had just backed off and gone longer they could for sure have made a one-stop. But I was getting the information of the times they were doing, and there’s no way your tyres are going to last at that pace.”
The idea McLaren were wedded to a two-stop strategy is underlined by the haste with which they brought Lando Norris into the pits, seizing the opportunity to “undercut” Leclerc for second place. Norris was shaping up to pass Leclerc on the track at the time.
Two laps later, McLaren brought Oscar Piastri in from the lead. His lap times were holding up well compared to the second Ferrari of Carlos Sainz Jnr, which had also not yet pitted. McLaren appeared to bring him less due to the state of his tyres and more because they didn’t want to let him fall behind Norris and Leclerc, who swapped positions through their first pit stops.
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After the race Piastri dismissed the idea that pushing too hard early on made the one-stop strategy impossible for McLaren. However he conceded they could have approached the race differently in terms of both tactics and, crucially, driving technique.
“I need to go back and look at what the graining level on Charles was when I pitted for the second time. Up until that point it was you know a pretty controlled race. We felt pretty early on that it was a two-stop race and maybe, in hindsight, there are things we could have done a bit differently from obviously a strategy point of view, but also a…
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