The Mercedes driver had climbed up from eleventh place on the grid to third place after receiving a 10-place penalty in the race for changing the engine and being the last of the runners to make his only pit stop for new intermediates on lap 50 – while Esteban Ocon was the only one Was the driver who did not stop during the entire race.
With the intermediate tires, Hamilton’s performance deteriorated due to heavy wear and tear and Mercedes called him with eight laps to go, putting him in fifth place behind Red Bull’s Sergio Perez and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc.
The majority of drivers suffered from graining on fresh intermediate tires and lost power about two to three laps after the start of the stint, which meant that Hamilton dropped the back of Leclerc and was pressurized by Pierre Gasly afterwards.
While Hamilton was able to hold fifth place on the checkered flag, he let his frustration arise over his Mercedes team radio during his last stint about his racing strategy.
After the race, Hamilton said that Mercedes should either have pitted him earlier and in the order of the drivers he was fighting against, or instructed him to preserve the tire life so that it could make it to the end without a pit stop.
“The tires are bare so you don’t know how far they’re going to go,” Hamilton told Sky Sports F1. “And there is definitely the concern about the life of the tire. But even there I wasn’t really fast in the end. I had to struggle with low grip. I don’t know exactly why.
“Then suddenly I don’t have such a bad place. But I lost performance to the guys behind. I think in retrospect I think I should have either stayed outside or got in much earlier.”
“Because if you arrive eight laps before the end, you don’t have time to go through the tire graining phase on a drying track. So I went through this whole slide phase in which I almost lost four positions. A little frustrating, but that’s how it is.
“It felt good to be third and it was like, if I can keep it up, that’s a great result from eleventh. Fifth is worse, but it could be worse.”
Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W12, Sergio Perez, Red Bull Racing RB16B
Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff revealed that the team’s strategy predicted that Perez and Leclerc would have overtaken Hamilton if he hadn’t made it to the finish and wanted to avoid the higher risk of tire failure due to extreme wear.
“Yes, DNFing and you lose all points, that is of course catastrophic,” said Wolff to Sky Sports F1.
“He would definitely have been overtaken by Perez and Leclerc if we had tried to stay out so it wouldn’t have worked.
“The conservative game of going early on the track behind Perez and Leclerc and trying to probably overtake the best, but the probability wasn’t the right one.”
With the F1 world championship rival Max Verstappen, who finished the Turkish GP in second behind Valtteri Bottas, the Red Bull driver has regained the championship lead by six points from Hamilton.
