Originally Posted by Nessun Dorma:
“I think Mercedes were caught napping today. They should have let Lewis pass Nico, take the box first and queued Nico, Nico would have lost no more than three seconds and Lewis could have taken the undercut from Grosjean or Raikkonen.”
Thought the same myself.
Common sense dictates that when you've got one car that needs tyres and another one that needs repair you do the simplest job first, thus getting at least one of your cars back up to full speed.
Hamilton was summat like 8 seconds off the pace for half a dozen laps. 3 laps of that pace is the equivalent of a pit-stop.
To me, it seems like Merc' sometimes do a good job of hiding the shortcomings of their car but races like Korea remind us that it really
does still have some pretty big flaws.
The Merc' is probably getting better at looking after tyres but it's still pretty marginal and, in a straight fight between, say, a Lotus, a Merc' and a Ferrari, it's
always going to be the Merc' that falls away first.
Seems like they need to accept that and then adopt a race-strategy accordingly.
They need to realise that if, say, a 2 stop is just about theoretically possible but a 3-stop is also an option, they should really opt for the latter (with Hamilton, particularly) and then just tell him he's, basically, got to use the tyres to go quick enough to make it work.
In fact, Merc' should realise that Hamilton's greatest asset is his raw speed and willingness to fight.
Given that this season is all but lost, I think it'd be smart to just ditch strategy completely for one race.
Let Hamilton race the f**king wheels off the car right through the race and come in for new tyres whenever he needs them.
That would, at least, give them an idea of how much time they're losing due to all the tyre-saving malarkey and, conversely, if he ended up in 15th place as a result, it'd show
Hamilton the benefit of looking after the tyres rather than going balls-out all the time.