Lewis Hamilton’s start on the soft tyres at the Singapore Grand Prix was a “clear mistake,” according to Mercedes technical chief James Allison.
The only driver in the top 10 to choose softer tires for the Marina Bay Street Circuit race on Sunday was Hamilton.
The seven-time world champion challenged Max Verstappen into Turn 1, but he was not able to secure a starting position.
After that, Hamilton’s performance eventually deteriorated, and on lap 17, he entered the pits.
This turned out to be too early, as teammate George Russell overcut him, and Oscar Piastri and Charles Leclerc eventually defeated him.
After the Singapore Grand Prix, Hamilton has previously expressed his disapproval of the approach at an event sponsored by Petronas.
Allison gave an explanation of their decision to go with the softs in a video that was posted on Mercedes’ YouTube account.
He began, “I will just say that we shouldn’t have started on the softs; that was a mistake, before I give the explanation.” “We would choose the mediums, just like others around us, if we could go back in time.
The thinking behind this was that the soft tire frequently gives you the ability to break away from the start quickly and gives you a decent chance of leaping a spot or two in the first few laps of the race. Prior to the race, we really had no idea that we would encounter the kinds of problems we had on the soft rubber.
“We thought we would benefit from the soft rubber by obtaining one or two spots. We didn’t since the beginnings transpired in that manner.
In general, the pace starts very, very easy in Singapore and the drivers then build up the pace over many, many laps, leaving a soft tyre perfectly OK to run relatively deep into the pit window, so we hoped that the downside of the soft being a bit more fragile wouldn’t play out particularly badly.
We didn’t start in the right position; the pace picked up around lap five, which made Lewis’s car unhappy in the first place and forced him to arrive early due to the car’s poor degradation. For him, it completely derailed his race. A glaring error
