The stop on lap 8 could have helped Hamilton win the F1 US GP

Hamilton led the opening stages in Austin on Sunday, but rival Red Bull took the initiative when it came to the undercut with Verstappen on lap 11 – which helped him move to the top.

Mercedes tried to counter Red Bull’s approach by extending Hamilton’s stints as long as possible to give him fresher rubber at the end of the race. However, the speed advantage was not enough to bring the world champion close enough to Verstappen for a pass.

When you think about whether there were any other options that could have brought victory, Mercedes thinks it should have been bolder to stop much earlier than it struggled on the mid-size tires during the first stint.

When asked what Mercedes should have done differently, Andrew Shovlin, Engineering Director at the trackside, said: “Maybe had a crystal ball and realized that the hard tire would have been the better tire for us!

“Realistically, the options of winning the race will likely be to keep the lead after the very good start Lewis made with an early stop – and maybe pitting on lap eight.

“But since we struggled with the media in such a short stint, we would never have been brave enough to just keep the lead. It would have felt like we were compromising the whole race.

“But I think we could have made an early stop and reached the goal. But it would have been a case to pull the trigger sooner and then hope for the best to see if Lewis can keep Max at bay. But that was really the greatest chance. “

While Red Bull was able to roll the dice when Verstappen was trapped behind Hamilton, Mercedes isn’t sure it would have had such a chance if it had been runner-up at this point in the race.

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Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB16B, fights with Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W12, at the start

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“It changes your mindset when you’re on P2 because the worst thing you can get is P2 as most of the time the races are won by Lewis and Max with no other problems,” explained Shovlin.

“But the big question is, could we have kept up? And I’m sure we couldn’t have sat on their gear like they did to us.

“Whether we could have stayed within an underrange is another question. It depends on the poor performance we had on the medium tire. And if we weren’t in the undercut area, Max would have just walked a long time and divided the race into nice, manageable pieces.

“It just so happened that the best we could do when they undercut us was to try and create a little misalignment. But in the end the race wasn’t long enough to pay off. “

However, it was clear to Mercedes that Hamilton’s tires wouldn’t last long enough for them to consider a one-stop race.

“We saw a lot of the field starting to work harder in the last stint and getting the deterioration under control,” added Shovlin.

“But when people pushed hard, the tires fell off incredibly quickly. So a station would be outside of the [equation].

“The medium wasn’t good enough. We could have done it with two hardships, but you can’t drive that. We struggled too much on the center line for us and a three-stop stop didn’t make it back so it was a nailed two-stop that we expected to come here. “