Hi, I’m James Vowles,
I’m the Motorsport Strategy Director
for the team,
and I am here to answer
your questions about
the Hungarian Grand Prix.
Valtteri had contact with Leclerc
on the first lap of the race.
The damage wasn’t so sufficient
it required a new front wing immediately,
there was damage,
but we had to take our time
to assess exactly how much
it was, and how much lap time
Valtteri was losing as a result.
As you can see on the image,
the damage there isn't such
that the whole flap has
fallen off, but
it did lose performance.
And more so, Valtteri,
because of the multiple lock-ups,
started to have very big vibrations
on the tyres.
We left Valtteri out
a few laps to access
the whole situation,
but ultimately the vibrations
were so significant,
and this damage so much performance loss,
that we brought him in,
changed the front wing
and converted to one more
stop during the race.
On the first stint of the race
it was clear
that in order to beat Verstappen
we were either going to have to undercut him,
or do an overcut
and try and create a tyre offset.
Obviously, we went
for the latter of the two
but we very much considered
the undercut.
The problem is we had
two Ferraris in the pit window.
We had both Vettel and Leclerc
for many laps.
Eventually, Vettel moved out
and it was only Leclerc in the window,
and that was the decision point
we had to make:
do we want to stop
and try an undercut?
There were two problems.
The first is the Hard
has a small warmup scope.
It wasn’t quite ready
for the first few corners
when you went out,
so it’s difficult to immediately
be on the pace of Verstappen
who would have stayed out,
the second is:
you would have to overtake
a very fast Ferrari immediately on exit.
And the reality is,
when you are only
a second a half
behind a car,
like Verstappen,
you are not going to
make up all that time
on an out lap.
So, we decided to stay long.
Verstappen stopped on the first
opportunity he could where he had
a free air gap,
that was the right thing
for them to do,
and that then led
us to go long and offset.
After the stop
Valtteri had to fight
through the field
to get back up into the points.
He didn’t have
what we would call a tyre delta.
He was on new Hard tyres,
everyone in front was
either on new Medium or,
in some cases,
a few Hard runners as well.
And to overtake you need two things.
Typically, you need a performance difference,
but that comes from tyre delta
and car performance delta.
The tyre delta has now been removed,
everyone is on the same age tyre,
so you are purely reliant
on how much faster a Mercedes is,
say than a McLaren.
The result of that is,
you don’t quite have
the performance gap
you require to get clean passing.
And Valtteri had to take
quite a few risks
to get through the field.
Budapest is also one
of the hardest tracks
of the year to overtake.
It is not Monaco,
but it is right up there
in terms of difficulty,
and it made life difficult for Valtteri.
He did a great job,
he had potential to get up to fifth,
ultimately eighth is as far
as he could make it in terms of overtaking.
Going into the race
we had less data than normal
due to the wet running on Friday.
No one had long run the Hard tyre,
run it with fuel to understand
how the wear, the degradation
and how it would progress in the race.
And that creates a lot of unknows.
Everyone went into the race,
ourselves included,
with the intention of one-stopping.
It is incredibly difficult to overtake
in Budapest, and the tyres
should make it based on our forecasts of life.
As we went in
it was clear there was no undercut opportunity,
our next plan was to offset ourselves
on tyres relative to Verstappen.
And then force him into a situation
where he is using his Hard tyre resource
as much as possible,
and maybe push him off the end of the curve.
As Verstappen and Lewis started
to pull away from the field,
it became obvious that
other opportunities existed,
which in our case, was a two-stop.
We have a team behind the scenes
that are working tirelessly.
They took the morsels of data
from Friday, the little running
that we had, and constructed
models as to how our tyres and Verstappen’s
tyres
would perform during the race.
And they were spot on.
It is those models
that enable us to understand
that two-stop would very much lead
to a fantastic situation
at the end of the race,
and that Verstappen’s tyres
should drop off the curve
if we can pressure him enough.
Once we had committed and pitted Lewis,
it was clear that there was
this huge mountain to climb.
We had twenty seconds
of race time that we had to make up,
and then we had to overtake Verstappen
at the end of the race.
Lewis, rightly so,
had concerns about that
but every lap he delivered a lap time
we needed in order to do that.
It caused Verstappen to have to respond,
and fight hard and use the tyre
he had available to him to pull that gap further,
but it was with no avail,
ultimately, he fall off the tyre curve,
as the team predicted,
and we ended up with the win.
For Lewis’ final stop
we had a choice between
a Soft or a Medium.
We had seen from Friday’s work
the Soft wasn’t as resilient,
it had more degradation.
And that was in cooler temperatures
than we were experiencing in the race.
More so though,
we need a tyre that is extremely strong
right at the end of the stint.
Once you have caught to the back of Verstappen,
and the Medium became the obvious choice.
You may have seen on TV
clouds of black dust coming out
from the front wheels,
or perhaps heard some of the comments
that we had given to Lewis
about his brake situation.
They were hot.
Budapest is a difficult track to cool the
brakes.
There aren’t really long enough straight,
and when you are in traffic behind the car
ahead,
lap after lap,
you don’t get the airflow required
to bring the temperatures down.
The result of that is Lewis
had to do quite a bit of management
to take the temperature out of the brakes.
You brake a little bit less,
and lift a little bit more into the corners,
and he did all of that
while still attacking Verstappen
lap after lap and delivering the lap times
that we needed him to do.
He did a great job,
brakes made it to the end,
and ultimately,
he got the win.
The feeling when you win a race,
and that you and your team
have delivered everything
across a race weekend,
and that you are part of that result,
is incredible.
You feel your heart beating
in your chest the whole way through.
You feel all the emotions come out in one
go.
You would have seen
Toto’s expression of joy as well.
That’s nothing compared
to being able to go onto the podium
and have the privilege of representing the
team.
It’s emotions like no other.
You are up there,
and you can see thousands of people looking
back at you.
And you realise you are part
of something incredibly special,
and you are a part of history.
That emotion is something
that will stay with me forever,
and I am really thankful
to have been able to do that multiple times.
When you are up there though,
what you learn very quickly,
is Lewis has been there far more than you
have.
And he knows what to do.
And from four seconds,
because I counted it,
before he should have really picked up
the champagne bottle,
he had picked it up,
shook it,
and he had spayed it in my eyes.
You are now blind,
you can’t see anything at all.
What’s more,
it’s now dripping on the ground,
I’m fumbling all over the place,
and I appreciate I embarrassed myself.
I’m really thankful for everything,
and I’m so glad
I had the opportunity to be there
and it’s an emotion and a memory that will
stay with me forever.
Thank you very much for all of your questions,
I’ve enjoyed answering them,
and we look forward to answering
your questions after the Belgian Grand Prix.
