Allison: We shouldn’t have started Soft

Mercedes technical director James Allison admits the team made a mistake in developing Lewis Hamilton’s strategy in Singapore.

James Ellison: “Before I explain, I want to say that we should not have started with Soft. This is a clear mistake. If time could be turned back, we would have chosen the first segment Medium, just like other teams.

Our logic was that soft tyres give better starting dynamics, allow you to get away quickly and give you a good chance to gain back one or two positions in the first laps.

Before the race we didn’t expect the difficulties we encountered with the Soft, believing that we would gain an advantage. This didn’t happen, but we hoped that the Soft tyres wouldn’t lose their efficiency too quickly and would allow us to drive more.

In Singapore, the speeds are usually low at the start, then the drivers gradually increase the pace, and with soft tyres they can reach the optimum number of laps before a stop. But we couldn’t make up for it at the start, the pack went faster and Lewis was left behind and lost more and more speed to his rivals on tyres that were losing efficiency, so he went to the pit lane early. This ruined his race and it was a clear mistake.

If Lewis had been able to fight back at the start and when the safety car came out, he would have had a new set of Medium tyres for the last part. We considered this option, it could work very well.

But events turned out differently, we switched to the Soft – Medium strategy. We thought about doing two pit stops – he could have been on newer tyres and would have been faster, but all our calculations showed that this would not have made up for the lost time.”