Palmer: Did Hamilton have a chance to beat Verstappen?

Jolyon Palmer, a former Formula 1 driver and now an expert on the championship’s official website, analyzed the events of the Mexico City race weekend and tried to understand whether Lewis Hamilton had a chance of beating Max Verstappen in the race.

Max Verstappen is having a great season and rightly took his fourteenth victory, marking his dominance in 2022. No one has had more wins in one season. It is unlikely that anyone can get ahead of Max and Red Bull in the two remaining races.

Max won confidently in Mexico City, but could Mercedes beat him? Mercedes employees flew to Mexico City in good spirits. The thin air caused by the high elevation of the city meant that the high drag of the car, which hampered their speed on the straights this year, would be reduced.

Verstappen put in a great lap in qualifying and took pole, doing what no other Mercedes driver has ever done: collecting the best three sectors in one lap. Lewis Hamilton had to be more careful in the decisive attempt as his result was annulled during the first attempt in the final for breaching the track boundaries. At the same time, George Russell drove his attempt at Max’s pace, but made a mistake in Turn 12 and broke the lap.

However, the particularity of the circuit in Mexico City is such that pole position was not always a guarantee of success – in the previous three Grand Prix, no winner of first place could climb the podium at the start. Therefore, on Saturday night, speculation about a Mercedes victory, or at least a spectacular battle for victory, seemed logical.

Everything changed after the Dutch driver took pole – he won the expected victory. What we didn’t expect was the “pale” of Mercedes, because on other tracks with a less competitive pace they were even closer to victory than in Mexico City. This was a result of their strategy and the use of hard tires in the race.

The composition of Hard was not the optimal choice. This is confirmed by Daniel Ricciardo, who broke through the pack on soft tires. He was quick enough to make up for a well-deserved 10-second penalty for colliding with Yuki Tsunoda at turn six after a failed attack attempt.

In the second stint, Ricciardo won 20 seconds on Soft over Lando Norris on Hard, so it’s likely Mercedes’ similar pick could have given Hamilton a chance to take on Verstappen in the closing laps, given his 15-second lead .

Mercedes had to make a difficult decision. If Hamilton had stayed on track to wait for the transition to Soft, Sergio Perez would have caught up with him. Mercedes made an understandable choice, but otherwise the result of the seven-time world champion would probably not have changed.

Hamilton, unlike Norris, was driving on an empty track, so the comparison with Ricciardo’s speed probably doesn’t quite hold. However, if Lewis switched to Soft, the battle against Max would have been sharper if Hamilton had been able to overtake Perez quickly after the pit stop, although this was not guaranteed, given Red Bull’s top speed advantage.

In my opinion, the bigger mistake was leaving Russell on Hard. All weekend, George was not inferior to Lewis in speed and in the race he was fourth – he had nothing to lose. If they had handed it over to Soft, Mercedes would most likely have won a double podium. George has urged the team to give him soft tires, but Mercedes has been careful with its strategy in Mexico City – it is impossible to challenge the mighty Verstappen-Red Bull team in 2022 with this approach.

Verstappen should take credit for how he withstood the pressure in the early laps and then optimized his strategy by riding a fairly long stretch on Medium tires. The tire load on the Mexican circuit has always not been very high, but behind the wheel the rider still has to put in some effort.

Verstappen’s victories from low positions taught him to work his way up. He bounced back from a bad pit stop in Austin, bounced back from his own mistakes in Barcelona and Hungary, he wins on dry and wet tracks. Of the six races Max didn’t win this year, he would have either won or finished on the podium had it not been for reliability issues. At Silverstone he was prevented by damage to the car and in Singapore the team made a rare mistake in qualifying. Probably the only weekend this year Max spent at an intermediate level in Monaco.

Those hoping to fight Verstappen next year should either improve themselves or bet that Max will relax a bit after winning the second title, as there aren’t many weaknesses in his armor at the moment.