Hamilton said after the race it was too soon to have a reasonable photo of the relative aggressiveness of the cars.
“I never know how it will work out,” he said. “You don’t get a decent comprehension until after four races.” The fact of the matter being that Formula 1 cars don’t act the same on a wide range of tracks, and the holes will recurring pattern.
Hamilton said he could have completed various things to avert what happened had he just known the issue holding up to trip Mercedes up. Group manager Toto Wolff included they would have requested that he construct a greater hole in the main stretch. As he just required one more second or something like that, it’s difficult to envision he would not have possessed the capacity to do it.”Qualifying is extremely important,” Vettel said. “We had a good session but the gap was too big. That’s what I meant by we are not yet where we want to be.” Get pole and win the start, he said and “you can control the race – as Lewis did in the beginning and I did in the end”.
Hamilton unquestionably had a pace advantage over the Ferraris behind him, however it was no place close as large as it looked in qualifying, when he took shaft with an awesome lap that put him 0.7 seconds clear of the field. The hole between them when Raikkonen influenced Ferrari’s first pit to stop in the pincer development that caught Hamilton was 3.3secs after 17 laps. On a few laps, Hamilton had been as much as 0.5secs faster, however on others Raikkonen returned at him. How much snappier could Hamilton have gone?
“Everybody has been discussing [a qualifying engine] ‘party mode’ and how much faster we are,” Hamilton said. “He was grisly fast in the main spell. It was difficult at all to pull far from him. What I believed I could have done was taken care of my tires extremely well and I could have gone further.”
Doing that, however, would have presumably given Raikkonen the lead through what is known as the ‘under-cut’ – ceasing prior and utilizing the additional pace of new tires to jump the car ahead that stops later. Mercedes set Hamilton on the following lap to secure against that incident.
The Ferrari behind Hamilton in that first stretch was Kimi Raikkonen, driving an exceptionally solid first race few days of the season.
