Toto Wolff apologised to Lewis Hamilton over the team radio after the Singapore Grand Prix. The Brit was left fuming with his tyre strategy during a difficult outing in the Marina Bay heat.
Hamilton qualified in P3 on Saturday, finishing ahead of team-mate George Russell on a Saturday for just the fifth time this season, but the seven-time world champion’s Grand Prix was far less straightforward.
Mercedes made the decision to start the Brit on soft-compound tyres with the majority of the field on mediums. He was unable to make inroads on second-placed Max Verstappen at the start, and quickly started to struggle with his Pirelli rubber.
With George Russell waiting patiently behind in P4, Mercedes made the call to bring Hamilton into the pit lane on lap 18, long before the rest of the frontrunners. From here, the 39-year-old complained about the extreme tyre offset and performance of his W15 machine.
When the chequered flag dropped, Hamilton had slumped from third on the grid to sixth on the road with Russell, Oscar Piastri and Charles Leclerc – who started from P9 – all making their way past.
Team principal Wolff was apologetic after the race. “Yeah Lewis, sorry,” he said on the radio. “We gave you a car that was just not good enough here and obviously, we read the race wrong, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. We were just slow today.”
Race engineer Peter Bonnington also had some reassuring words for his driver. “Lewis mate that’s P6,” he explained. “That tyre gamble really shot us in the foot there.”
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