Hamilton: Pole a relief after “wrong tyre strategy”

Lewis Hamilton said he was relieved to take pole position in Singapore despite having chosen the “wrong tyre strategy” for this weekend’s race.

The Mercedes driver said he was at a disadvantage because the team had chosen fewer sets of the hyper-soft tyres than any of their rivals.

“Everyone was starting on the hyper-softs and they were getting the experience and we were starting on the [ultra] softs and there is a huge difference compared to the hyper,” said Hamilton.

Hamilton admitted he was “nervous” in Q1 as he made the cut for Q2 on his ultra-soft tyres by just two-tenths of a second. “I definitely was a little bit concerned but we were aware that we came here with the wrong tyre strategy in the sense that others had more hypers than us,” he said.

“Already from practice we weren’t best prepared. Others started on softer tyres in [first practice] and also in [second and third practice]. So we definitely lost some running because the tyre [gaps] are massive, massive. You could see it’s two or three seconds or whatever it was between the tyres.”

He said he was surprised Ferrari tried to get their drivers through Q2 using the ultra-softs.

“I’m not quite sure why the Ferraris did the run on that tyre – I don’t know if they had four new sets of hypers, probably unlikely, so that’s probably why they had to take another tyre. But you could already have seen from our run that you were not going to get through there, so that just leaves me to believe that they probably just didn’t have an extra tyre.”

Although Hamilton set his pole position lap time on his first run in Q3, he said it was important to know he had the opportunity to do an extra run having saved a set of hyper-softs.

“Once we got to Q3 it was nice but the extra run that others got, I think they had an advantage going into qualifying just by having the extra run on the hyper-soft.”

“It was just about pulling all the little bits you found through practice and trying to see if you could put it into a perfect puzzle,” he explained. “And 99.9% of time it doesn’t go right.

“But that lap, honestly, I didn’t have a wheel spin, I didn’t have a snap anywhere. The car was just underneath me and I managed to maximise on pretty much any corner. I can’t remember one where I thought I could do more.”

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff revealed his opposite number at Sauber Frederic Vasseur poked fun at Hamilton’s near-miss in Q1: “My friend Vasseur sent me a text message and said ‘You know what the difference is between and idiot and a genius? Two tenths.’ And I think that summaries pretty well.”

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