Red Bull impresses Mercedes: 'We never had the courage'
F1 News
- GPblog.com
The United States Grand Prix was a party for the fans, but also for Red Bull Racing. Max Verstappen managed to win this Grand Prix, partly due to a great strategy of the team. Andrew Shovlin, technical director of Mercedes, says that they could have used a similar strategy, but that in hindsight they were too cautious.
At turn one Lewis Hamilton was already overtaking Verstappen, but a good pit stop strategy from the Milton Keynes-based team managed to do a successful undercut. Hamilton was brought in later to do a longer second stint, but the Dutchman still managed to take the win. The British team admits that they should have brought him in earlier to maintain the lead, but they didn't have the courage.
"Given that we were struggling on mediums during the short stint, we would never have had the courage to do that just to keep the lead. It would have felt like we were putting the whole race at risk," said the British engineer at Motorspeedweek.
Analysing what went wrong
Verstappen's victory at a circuit where Mercedes are normally dominant has certainly caused a sense of disappointment for the team.
"It's hard for us to be happy with anything other than the races where we extend that lead [in the championship]. So there's still a lot to analyse, but the key for this year is going to be optimising the car from track to track and that's what we need to be working on now rather than worrying or being frustrated with the result here."