Lewis Hamilton might be starting to feel as though the Monaco Grand Prix has something against him. Arguably the most able Formula 1 driver of his generation has competed in nine F1 events around the streets of the Principality, but has only one win (in 2008) to his name.
By rights that statistic should have changed in Monte Carlo this year, but Hamilton was left to rue yet another missed Monaco opportunity, thanks to a strategic blunder by his Mercedes team that handed a third consecutive triumph in this race to his team-mate and title rival Nico Rosberg.
Hamilton has a disappointing record here for a driver of his obvious ability. And no matter what he does he cannot seem to shake the habit. In fact, the only time he's really managed to catch a 'lucky' break around this circuit was in 2008, when he claimed his only Monaco win for McLaren despite hitting the barriers at Tabac early in the race and puncturing his right-rear tyre.
Otherwise his Monaco record has been stymied, sometimes by matters of his own making, others by situations outside his control.
In 2007 he had the pace to challenge for victory, but was forced to concede strategic advantage to his McLaren team-mate Fernando Alonso, and thus settle for second. In 2009 he crashed into the Mirabeau barriers in the first segment of qualifying and thus could finish no higher than a lapped 12th.
When he won in 2008, even a puncture couldn't stop Hamilton © XPB |
In 2010 he finished a fifth in a car that wasn't capable of winning. In the following season's race he copped a double penalty for colliding with Felipe Massa and Pastor Maldonado (before his infamously ill-advised "maybe it's because I'm black" Ali G reference with regard to being 'picked on' by the stewards).
The year after that he went backwards after struggling to keep Pirelli's delicate tyres in shape, while in 2013 he was running a close second behind Rosberg but dropped too far back before Mercedes made a double pitstop under the safety car, so lost places.
Last season, of course, he trailed Rosberg after their first runs in Q3 before his team-mate's 'off' at Mirabeau sealed pole position, and Hamilton's ultimate fate...
Various factors have contributed to making Lewis Hamilton's Monaco results far less than they might be, but the main reason he hasn't won much in Monte Carlo is because of a mediocre qualifying record. Staggeringly, Hamilton had never sat on pole position for the Monaco Grand Prix until this season. And everyone knows, winning from anywhere other than pole here usually requires, well, the opposite of bad luck...
The galling thing for Hamilton this time is that he did everything right - beating Rosberg to pole by over three tenths of a second, acing the start, and then controlling the race from the front. As Hamilton crossed the line to begin his 64th of 78 laps, it looked as if he was finally set to break his Monte Carlo F1 hoodoo.
He led by more than 19 seconds from Rosberg, who had spent most of his race preoccupied with the challenge of Sebastian Vettel's Ferrari behind. Everything was under control, it seemed.
Then Max Verstappen's Toro Rosso flew over the back of Romain Grosjean's Lotus and crashed heavily at Sainte Devote. FIA race director Charlie Whiting deployed the virtual safety car immediately, before calling for the real thing when it became clear the severity of the impact necessitated deployment of the medical car to the scene as a precaution.
It was at this point that certain victory slipped through Hamilton's fingers. Mercedes reacted by pitting Hamilton for a second time and switching him back on to the faster super-soft tyre. The trouble was Hamilton did not have a big enough advantage to get in and out of the pits without conceding the lead.
Hamilton was in a class of his own for most of the race © XPB |
He led Rosberg by 19.349s at the moment the virtual safety car was deployed, but needed more than 24s in hand to resume the race in front of the pack. The fastest pitstop duration of the entire race was Kimi Raikkonen's sole stop on lap 37, which took 24.177s, meaning Hamilton was already 4.826s shy of the gap he needed - even without the fact his extra stop was another 1.318s slower than Ferrari's benchmark (on account of having to wait for Felipe Nasr's Sauber to drive past in the pitlane).
So the question on everyone's lips after seeing Rosberg, not Hamilton, win the 62nd running of the Monaco Grand Prix was: why on Earth did Mercedes decide to make that extra stop?
"The simple answer is we got the math, the calculation wrong," explained team boss Toto Wolff, during a packed media briefing in the Mercedes motorhome. "We thought we had a gap which we didn't have when the safety car came out. In Monaco, you have no GPS and that makes the whole exercise more difficult - this is why we got it wrong when it switched from the virtual safety into the safety car.
"The potential risk [of not pitting] could have been that Sebastian switched on to a softer tyre behind us, and coming up behind Nico he could have been a risk at the end. Now, very simply from a common-sense overview I agree it [the pitstop] looks like a risk. But the simple answer was the numbers were wrong. The calculation was simply wrong."
The incorrect calculation Wolff refers to may have been the result of a piece of temporary misinformation. When the virtual safety car was deployed, Hamilton's lead ballooned momentarily from 19s to 26s on the live timing loops. So it's possible Mercedes misread that as Hamilton's true advantage, which would have been enough (even with a slow pitstop) to get in and out if the pits with his lead intact.
The FIA later clarified that GPS is available in Monaco, but notwithstanding the specific gaps, pitting Hamilton still seemed an unnecessary strategic gamble. He'd been comfortably stretching away before the safety car (virtual or otherwise) was deployed, and even though that lead would have evaporated if he'd stayed out, he would have continued to enjoy the double advantage of track position (more crucial around this circuit than anywhere else) and the buffer of his team-mate (on the same tyre) to protect him from Vettel.
Verstappen's crash turned the race upside down © XPB |
Sure, everyone had struggled to generate sufficient tyre temperature and grip on rubber that Pirelli admitted was too hard for this circuit, so there was a risk Hamilton might become stuck in the vicious cycle of cold tyres once racing resumed, but the track was rubbered in, its surface temperature was substantially hotter than previously, and the W06 is far better at generating tyre temperature than any other car in the field anyway.
It looked as though this might have been a case of Mercedes over-thinking (and thus over-complicating) matters for itself, but it seemed Hamilton also played his part in the confusion.
"I saw a screen; it looked like the team was out and I thought that Nico and the guys behind were pitting," he explained. "The team said to stay out, I said: 'these tyres are going to drop in temperature,' and what I was assuming was that these guys [behind] would be on options [super-softs] and I was on the harder tyre. So, they [the team] said to pit. Without thinking I came in with full confidence that the others had done the same."
But Wolff insisted afterwards that Hamilton's message about the tyre temperatures had not been the significant factor in the decision.
"We talked about it and there was the message [from Hamilton] that the temperatures dropped a lot and there was no grip anymore in the soft tyre, but that is still not the reason why we did it," Wolff explained. "The numbers just added up.
"The final decision was made 50 metres before the pit entry. The decisions are being made jointly with a lot of information at the same time. Within a fraction of a second you need to make a call. We tried to get as much input as possible from the engineers, from the management, from the driver, and then take a decision. In that case, the algorithm was wrong."
Wolff had to explain how Mercedes' strategy went awry © LAT |
Talk of incorrect 'calculations' and 'algorithms' is all well and good, but Mercedes had already learned the hard way in Malaysia about the cost of conceding track position unnecessarily. On a circuit like Monaco, conceding this advantage is suicidal. As Hamilton's great idol Ayrton Senna proved back in 1992, it is possible to defend the lead from a much faster car on far fresher tyres around Monaco.
Even the circumstances of Verstappen's accident (as he fruitlessly pressured Grosjean's soft-tyred Lotus with his own super-soft shod Toro Rosso) was instructive as to just how difficult it is to make a genuine passing move here without the aid of being lapped yourself by a faster car, a trick Verstappen employed to gain some places.
Perhaps the lesson here is that sometimes too much information can be a bad thing in racing. "I think if you would count the probability, you would rather stick with the data," countered Wolff. "We have to follow the data, that's how the sport works."
But by doing that on one side of the garage, Mercedes gifted Hamilton's victory to Rosberg. To add insult to injury, Hamilton also came out of the pits just behind Vettel's Ferrari, which turned certain victory into third place for the erstwhile leader. Hamilton tried to muscle his way back ahead, but Vettel insisted over the radio that he was "in front at the safety car line". He was. Just. And Hamilton had to concede second place as well.
Knowing Hamilton was now right behind on a softer (and younger) set of tyres, Vettel was keen for the safety car to go quicker in order to help him maintain temperature in his own rubber before the restart. "It's like sending swimmers to swim with weight on their legs!" he cried over the radio.
Ultimately it mattered not. Hamilton tried to apply pressure to the Ferrari in what became an eight-lap sprint to the flag, but to no avail. Rosberg escaped to record his third Monaco victory, joining an elite group that includes Jackie Stewart, Stirling Moss, Alain Prost, Michael Schumacher, Graham Hill, and - of course - Hamilton's idol Senna.
Hamilton was left to rue what might have been, and the world champion was visibly and understandably distressed afterwards - even stopping briefly at Portier on the slowing down lap, in what seemed like an attempt to gather his thoughts.
Hamilton struggled to contain his emotions © LAT |
"I can't really express the way I feel, so I won't even attempt to," he told reporters after the race. "This is a race that has been very special... close to my heart for many years and so it was very important.
"It was a great feeling leading the race. I had so much pace I didn't really have to push too much - I could have doubled the lead if I needed it.
"So on the one hand it's a good thing that I had that pace and I'm grateful for that. You live to fight another day."
He does indeed, but with his championship lead now slashed to just 10 points as Rosberg gratefully gathered the spoils of glory. To his credit, Rosberg was magnanimous in accepting what he knew to be a slightly hollow victory.
"Lewis did a great job, he deserved to win, I'm very well aware of that, and I also feel for him - it's a horrible way to lose a race," said Rosberg, who revealed the possibility of pitting under the safety car had not even entered his head. "On the other side, a win is a win, and in sport luck plays a big factor, so I've learned to just take it.
"I still thought Lewis would win because he was on fresh super-softs and we were on stone-cold soft tyres - it was going to be a massive mission to not hit the wall after the restart. But I went for it, the temperature came back quick and I could do some good lap times.
"I'm aware I got lucky, very lucky, probably the luckiest I've ever been in my career, but I'll take it and enjoy it. I'm very happy, because winning Monaco is winning Monaco. It's just awesome."
Unfortunately for Hamilton, that experience is one he just can't recapture for himself, no matter how hard he tries.
Lewis Hamilton might be starting to feel as though the Monaco Grand Prix has something against him. Arguably the most able Formula 1 driver of his generation has competed in nine F1 events around the streets of the Principality, but has only one win (in 2008) to his name.
By rights that statistic should have changed in Monte Carlo this year, but Hamilton was left to rue yet another missed Monaco opportunity, thanks to a strategic blunder by his Mercedes team that handed a third consecutive triumph in this race to his team-mate and title rival Nico Rosberg.
Hamilton has a disappointing record here for a driver of his obvious ability. And no matter what he does he cannot seem to shake the habit. In fact, the only time he's really managed to catch a 'lucky' break around this circuit was in 2008, when he claimed his only Monaco win for McLaren despite hitting the barriers at Tabac early in the race and puncturing his right-rear tyre.
Otherwise his Monaco record has been stymied, sometimes by matters of his own making, others by situations outside his control.
In 2007 he had the pace to challenge for victory, but was forced to concede strategic advantage to his McLaren team-mate Fernando Alonso, and thus settle for second. In 2009 he crashed into the Mirabeau barriers in the first segment of qualifying and thus could finish no higher than a lapped 12th.
When he won in 2008, even a puncture couldn't stop Hamilton © XPB |
In 2010 he finished a fifth in a car that wasn't capable of winning. In the following season's race he copped a double penalty for colliding with Felipe Massa and Pastor Maldonado (before his infamously ill-advised "maybe it's because I'm black" Ali G reference with regard to being 'picked on' by the stewards).
The year after that he went backwards after struggling to keep Pirelli's delicate tyres in shape, while in 2013 he was running a close second behind Rosberg but dropped too far back before Mercedes made a double pitstop under the safety car, so lost places.
Last season, of course, he trailed Rosberg after their first runs in Q3 before his team-mate's 'off' at Mirabeau sealed pole position, and Hamilton's ultimate fate...
Various factors have contributed to making Lewis Hamilton's Monaco results far less than they might be, but the main reason he hasn't won much in Monte Carlo is because of a mediocre qualifying record. Staggeringly, Hamilton had never sat on pole position for the Monaco Grand Prix until this season. And everyone knows, winning from anywhere other than pole here usually requires, well, the opposite of bad luck...
The galling thing for Hamilton this time is that he did everything right - beating Rosberg to pole by over three tenths of a second, acing the start, and then controlling the race from the front. As Hamilton crossed the line to begin his 64th of 78 laps, it looked as if he was finally set to break his Monte Carlo F1 hoodoo.
He led by more than 19 seconds from Rosberg, who had spent most of his race preoccupied with the challenge of Sebastian Vettel's Ferrari behind. Everything was under control, it seemed.
Then Max Verstappen's Toro Rosso flew over the back of Romain Grosjean's Lotus and crashed heavily at Sainte Devote. FIA race director Charlie Whiting deployed the virtual safety car immediately, before calling for the real thing when it became clear the severity of the impact necessitated deployment of the medical car to the scene as a precaution.
It was at this point that certain victory slipped through Hamilton's fingers. Mercedes reacted by pitting Hamilton for a second time and switching him back on to the faster super-soft tyre. The trouble was Hamilton did not have a big enough advantage to get in and out of the pits without conceding the lead.
Hamilton was in a class of his own for most of the race © XPB |
He led Rosberg by 19.349s at the moment the virtual safety car was deployed, but needed more than 24s in hand to resume the race in front of the pack. The fastest pitstop duration of the entire race was Kimi Raikkonen's sole stop on lap 37, which took 24.177s, meaning Hamilton was already 4.826s shy of the gap he needed - even without the fact his extra stop was another 1.318s slower than Ferrari's benchmark (on account of having to wait for Felipe Nasr's Sauber to drive past in the pitlane).
So the question on everyone's lips after seeing Rosberg, not Hamilton, win the 62nd running of the Monaco Grand Prix was: why on Earth did Mercedes decide to make that extra stop?
"The simple answer is we got the math, the calculation wrong," explained team boss Toto Wolff, during a packed media briefing in the Mercedes motorhome. "We thought we had a gap which we didn't have when the safety car came out. In Monaco, you have no GPS and that makes the whole exercise more difficult - this is why we got it wrong when it switched from the virtual safety into the safety car.
"The potential risk [of not pitting] could have been that Sebastian switched on to a softer tyre behind us, and coming up behind Nico he could have been a risk at the end. Now, very simply from a common-sense overview I agree it [the pitstop] looks like a risk. But the simple answer was the numbers were wrong. The calculation was simply wrong."
The incorrect calculation Wolff refers to may have been the result of a piece of temporary misinformation. When the virtual safety car was deployed, Hamilton's lead ballooned momentarily from 19s to 26s on the live timing loops. So it's possible Mercedes misread that as Hamilton's true advantage, which would have been enough (even with a slow pitstop) to get in and out if the pits with his lead intact.
The FIA later clarified that GPS is available in Monaco, but notwithstanding the specific gaps, pitting Hamilton still seemed an unnecessary strategic gamble. He'd been comfortably stretching away before the safety car (virtual or otherwise) was deployed, and even though that lead would have evaporated if he'd stayed out, he would have continued to enjoy the double advantage of track position (more crucial around this circuit than anywhere else) and the buffer of his team-mate (on the same tyre) to protect him from Vettel.
Verstappen's crash turned the race upside down © XPB |
Sure, everyone had struggled to generate sufficient tyre temperature and grip on rubber that Pirelli admitted was too hard for this circuit, so there was a risk Hamilton might become stuck in the vicious cycle of cold tyres once racing resumed, but the track was rubbered in, its surface temperature was substantially hotter than previously, and the W06 is far better at generating tyre temperature than any other car in the field anyway.
It looked as though this might have been a case of Mercedes over-thinking (and thus over-complicating) matters for itself, but it seemed Hamilton also played his part in the confusion.
"I saw a screen; it looked like the team was out and I thought that Nico and the guys behind were pitting," he explained. "The team said to stay out, I said: 'these tyres are going to drop in temperature,' and what I was assuming was that these guys [behind] would be on options [super-softs] and I was on the harder tyre. So, they [the team] said to pit. Without thinking I came in with full confidence that the others had done the same."
But Wolff insisted afterwards that Hamilton's message about the tyre temperatures had not been the significant factor in the decision.
"We talked about it and there was the message [from Hamilton] that the temperatures dropped a lot and there was no grip anymore in the soft tyre, but that is still not the reason why we did it," Wolff explained. "The numbers just added up.
"The final decision was made 50 metres before the pit entry. The decisions are being made jointly with a lot of information at the same time. Within a fraction of a second you need to make a call. We tried to get as much input as possible from the engineers, from the management, from the driver, and then take a decision. In that case, the algorithm was wrong."
Wolff had to explain how Mercedes' strategy went awry © LAT |
Talk of incorrect 'calculations' and 'algorithms' is all well and good, but Mercedes had already learned the hard way in Malaysia about the cost of conceding track position unnecessarily. On a circuit like Monaco, conceding this advantage is suicidal. As Hamilton's great idol Ayrton Senna proved back in 1992, it is possible to defend the lead from a much faster car on far fresher tyres around Monaco.
Even the circumstances of Verstappen's accident (as he fruitlessly pressured Grosjean's soft-tyred Lotus with his own super-soft shod Toro Rosso) was instructive as to just how difficult it is to make a genuine passing move here without the aid of being lapped yourself by a faster car, a trick Verstappen employed to gain some places.
Perhaps the lesson here is that sometimes too much information can be a bad thing in racing. "I think if you would count the probability, you would rather stick with the data," countered Wolff. "We have to follow the data, that's how the sport works."
But by doing that on one side of the garage, Mercedes gifted Hamilton's victory to Rosberg. To add insult to injury, Hamilton also came out of the pits just behind Vettel's Ferrari, which turned certain victory into third place for the erstwhile leader. Hamilton tried to muscle his way back ahead, but Vettel insisted over the radio that he was "in front at the safety car line". He was. Just. And Hamilton had to concede second place as well.
Knowing Hamilton was now right behind on a softer (and younger) set of tyres, Vettel was keen for the safety car to go quicker in order to help him maintain temperature in his own rubber before the restart. "It's like sending swimmers to swim with weight on their legs!" he cried over the radio.
Ultimately it mattered not. Hamilton tried to apply pressure to the Ferrari in what became an eight-lap sprint to the flag, but to no avail. Rosberg escaped to record his third Monaco victory, joining an elite group that includes Jackie Stewart, Stirling Moss, Alain Prost, Michael Schumacher, Graham Hill, and - of course - Hamilton's idol Senna.
Hamilton was left to rue what might have been, and the world champion was visibly and understandably distressed afterwards - even stopping briefly at Portier on the slowing down lap, in what seemed like an attempt to gather his thoughts.
Hamilton struggled to contain his emotions © LAT |
"I can't really express the way I feel, so I won't even attempt to," he told reporters after the race. "This is a race that has been very special... close to my heart for many years and so it was very important.
"It was a great feeling leading the race. I had so much pace I didn't really have to push too much - I could have doubled the lead if I needed it.
"So on the one hand it's a good thing that I had that pace and I'm grateful for that. You live to fight another day."
He does indeed, but with his championship lead now slashed to just 10 points as Rosberg gratefully gathered the spoils of glory. To his credit, Rosberg was magnanimous in accepting what he knew to be a slightly hollow victory.
"Lewis did a great job, he deserved to win, I'm very well aware of that, and I also feel for him - it's a horrible way to lose a race," said Rosberg, who revealed the possibility of pitting under the safety car had not even entered his head. "On the other side, a win is a win, and in sport luck plays a big factor, so I've learned to just take it.
"I still thought Lewis would win because he was on fresh super-softs and we were on stone-cold soft tyres - it was going to be a massive mission to not hit the wall after the restart. But I went for it, the temperature came back quick and I could do some good lap times.
"I'm aware I got lucky, very lucky, probably the luckiest I've ever been in my career, but I'll take it and enjoy it. I'm very happy, because winning Monaco is winning Monaco. It's just awesome."
Unfortunately for Hamilton, that experience is one he just can't recapture for himself, no matter how hard he tries.
