Dunlay wrote: ↑25 Aug 2024, 18:07
GrizzleBoy wrote: ↑25 Aug 2024, 17:50
One thing I thought about with George's last stop, is that Merc actually had to do it to keep George ahead of Lewis.
If George stayed out and created a DRS train while fighting Sainz and Cheo (assuming they couldn't pass easily) Lewis would've been able to use the pace of his softs to get past all of them as he'd have approached all of them much earlier on much fresher and faster soft tyres.
Fantasy. There was no way George was going to keep Carlos behind, may be Perez. By the time Lewis arrived at the scene, he would have burned his tyres and got stuck in that train. Look what happened to Piastri behind Charles.
There's nothing fantasy about it.
Lewis held the gap and then caught George who was on tyres that had more pace than the hard tyres he would need to be defending with if he didn't pit.
If George did not stop, the pace differential would have:
1. Let Lewis catch upto the group much faster due to it being dictated by George's much slower pace (unless they passed him), therefore not requiring Lewis to use as much of his tyres catching them and instead using his tyres to pass them.
2. Let Lewis and others pass him due to the pace differential he had to them at the time (on the lap George pitted Carlos was 0.6s faster per lap and was already in DRS range).
Ultimately, I think Merc believed all three of Carlos, Sergio and Lewis were going to pass George based on how he was going backwards toward all of them and how much tyres he had left.
There were loads of laps left by the time Carlos at Checo were within a few seconds of George. If he was going backwards because of tyre management there would be no need to pit him. But it wasn't management that was sending him backwards and that's why he needed to pit one more time.
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