No heads will roll after the catastrophic team error that cost Lewis Hamilton an easy win in Monaco.<\/p>\n
But that doesn’t mean an exhaustive post-race investigation, prompted immediately by furious Mercedes team chairman Niki Lauda on Sunday, has not already found some heads to at least point at.<\/p>\n
“Our chief strategist James Vowles has admitted that he make a mistake.\u00a0 And we all make them,” the F1 legend is quoted by the German newspaper Bild.<\/p>\n
Lauda said Mercedes needs to tidy up its procedures so that better decisions are taken in moments of confusion.<\/p>\n
“I always listen on the radio, and I have already warned that because so many are talking, there needs to be someone making a decision when all the strategists are talking it to death.<\/p>\n
“To me that is Paddy Lowe,” said the great Austrian.<\/p>\n
Ferrari team boss Maurizio Arrivabene says his own strategists did not consider making a similar decision to pit Sebastian Vettel in the safety car period.<\/p>\n
“When I saw him (Hamilton) coming in, I said ‘caspita’ — that’s exactly what I said,” he revealed, using the word that translates in English as ‘Wow!’ or ‘Gosh!’<\/p>\n
“We thought they were doing a bit of theatre or something but this was an ‘arroganti’.\u00a0 But when you think you are intelligent, people forget to be smart,” Arrivabene added.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, the bizarre decision to pit Hamilton on Sunday was probably due more to confusion than arrogance.<\/p>\n
“The team said to stay out,” the gutted Hamilton revealed afterwards.\u00a0 “I said ‘These tyres are going to drop in temperature’ so they said to pit.<\/p>\n
“Without thinking I came in with full confidence that the others had done the same.”<\/p>\n
Drivers had been complaining about Pirelli’s supposedly ‘soft’ tyres all weekend, and were particularly nervous when the safety car was deployed for the Max Verstappen crash.<\/p>\n
“They (the tyres) were stone cold,” admitted race winner Nico Rosberg.<\/p>\n
Team boss Toto Wolff also explained that strategists were thrown by the lack of normal GPS positioning data in Monaco.<\/p>\n
“In Monaco there is no GPS,” he said, “which makes the whole job even more difficult.”<\/p>\n
But FIA race director Charlie Whiting told Auto Motor und Sport that is not right.\u00a0 “The teams work here with a replacement system, based on our 20 induction loops around the circuit,” he said.<\/p>\n
Wolff said Mercedes was also caught off guard by the new ‘virtual safety car’ innovation that morphed into a real safety car period, and said the team’s computer “algorithms” therefore got the sums wrong.<\/p>\n
“It would be completely wrong to start firing people or looking for the guilty faces in the crowd,” said the Austrian.<\/p>\n
Also wrong, said Wolff, is for the media and fans to start launching conspiracy theories — like Daimler chairman Dieter Zetsche, who was in the garage, preferred to see fellow German Rosberg win.<\/p>\n
“You can believe me,” Wolff insisted, “Mr Zetsche was very unhappy with this particular situation.”<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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