Mercedes
Hamilton opted for a soft tyre start, and used that compound wo climb back into the top 10 from his P14 grid slot. He managed to make them last long enough to negate any time losses an early pit stop would have cost, and then was extremely quick on the hards. Meanwhile Russell had been running third in the early stages but was undercut by Leclerc. He couldn’t keep Piastri at bay and was about to lose out to Sainz when the team brought him in for a second stop, which lost him a place to Perez. In the end he didn’t get that place back so the second stop cost him, as he finished with his team mate right on his tail despite having started 10 places ahead.
Lewis Hamilton, 8th
“We knew today was all about damage limitation. We managed to work our way back into the points but ultimately, we didn’t have the pace to fight for much more today. If we had qualified better yesterday, than it may have been a little different. I enjoyed getting past several cars though and putting the Soft tyre to use in that opening stint. It felt good to move forwards but I’m a little disappointed as if we had a better Saturday, then the fight would have been for more points.
“Strategy wise, we were looking at running to the end on the one-stop. I had a lock-up on the Hard tyre though and that meant we switched to the two-stop. It was a shame to lose the point for fastest lap at the end, but I should have put in a quicker effort earlier on.”
George Russell, 7th
“Today’s race was an odd one. We didn’t have the pace and that was the case on all three tyre compounds. It felt that I was sliding around quite a lot, suffering from high degradation, and slowly went backwards. We will have to understand why that was as we were relatively quick on Saturday. Performance does swing circuit to circuit, but we have been up near the front in the past six races. I am therefore confident that this is an outlier.
“We will get to work immediately to understand why we were slower than our competitors today. We have another race next weekend in Monza and we will aim to put in a much better showing there.”
Toto Wolff, Head of Mercedes-Benz Motorsport
“We had a bad race today. It was quite a contrast to the previous Grand Prix in Spa where we had set the pace and finished first and second on track. We clearly got some decisions wrong in terms of how we were running the car here. We will evaluate that quickly so we can avoid another race like this. It is bruising. Sometimes it is good to be bruised though to take a step forward.
“With George, we switched to a two-stop strategy as he was running out of tyre in his second stint. That higher degradation was likely in part due to some set-up decisions we took. We will need to do a full analysis to understand how much of it was down to that or other factors. With Lewis, we planned a two-stop race for him, although we were evaluating the one-stop midway through. However, he suffered a lock up on the Hard tyre and, with no risk behind, we switched him onto the two-stop strategy. His pace was good throughout though and that gives us encouragement. There is clearly lots of learning we can take from this weekend and hopefully we can bounce back next weekend in Monza.”
Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director
“Overall, it has been a poor weekend. We will go away and pick through the data to understand why we were off the pace both in qualifying and race trim. Today we were lacking the speed to fight for much more than we achieved. We were not generating good grip and, consequently, were sliding around on the tyre. That led to higher degradation than our competitors and forced us into a two-stop race. We were on the back foot today, but we will be working hard to ensure that isn’t the case next weekend in Monza.”