Mercedes F1 team chief Toto Wolff does not believe that Lewis Hamilton slowed the pace down during the Hungarian Grand Prix in a deliberate attempt to force teammate Nico Rosberg into the clutches of the chasing Red Bulls.
Wolf said after the race at Hungaroring, “I’m sure [Lewis] didn’t want to back him up. All weekend we were discussing with them that they need to be very cautious on the tyres. We didn’t have any experience on those tyres, so he over-managed it probably.”
“He had everything under control, he knew that Nico was behind him and didn’t realise that the [traffic] train was approaching fast and that there was a different strategy behind him, so I guess he didn’t have the complete picture and for him it looked OK. That’s why he just took it easy.”
At one point the Mercedes pitwall instructed Hamilton to up the pace, and Wolff explained, “The tyres needed 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.”
Hamilton denied suggestions of backing up tactics to hamper his teammate, “I wasn’t backing Nico up, and if he was quick enough he could have closed the gap if he’d wanted to. I’m sure after that I was able to pick up my pace and after that he was never a threat.”
“With the tyres, it’s like having £100 and spending it over the race distance. I just tried to spend it as wisely as I knew. If I had pushed a little bit more at the end, maybe I wouldn’t have got to the end the way I needed to. I felt like it was pretty perfectly managed – I didn’t have any problems,” revealed Hamilton.
Read the full story at GRAND PRIX 247
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