Lewis Hamilton believes Mercedes will have left their Formula One title challengers Ferrari reeling after their performance at the Canadian Grand Prix.
Hamilton took his sixth win at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve on Sunday, leading his team-mate Valtteri Bottas home in the first one-two for Mercedes this season. The Ferraris of Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen had difficult opening laps and they finished in fourth and seventh, with Vettel’s lead in the world championship cut from 25 points to 12.
Hamilton led from pole to flag in a flawless race but significantly – after a difficult weekend at the last round in Monaco, where he struggled to find the right set-up and finished seventh – he and the team had their car hooked up from the outset in Montreal.
“Ferrari have been doing a fantastic job all year but I just think this was Mercedes at its best,” Hamilton said. “It was our first one-two of the year, so in terms of optimal points it was the most powerful weekend we’ve had and we maximised it. If Ferrari do that to us, it’s a blow. It’s like a right hook. I hope this can continue throughout the year. I just hope at the end we are like [Floyd] Mayweather.”
Vettel lost places through damage to his front wing after early contact with Max Verstappen and did well to take fourth. But for Hamilton and Mercedes while closing the points gap was welcomed, of real import was that the team appear to have addressed the issues that have been making their car difficult to manage.
Hamilton had also struggled in Sochi, where he finished fourth, and that track and Monte Carlo share characteristics with Canada – low-grip, low-abrasion tracks with short duration corners and where the tyre selection of the softest rubber was also the same. The central issue Mercedes had is putting the tyres into what is a narrow temperature operating window, exacerbated by data correlation discrepancies. Montreal appeared to prove they finally have the solution.
“It was a reality check in Monaco,” said Hamilton. “We did a lot of analysis, making sure the simulations were right. We had to understand why the wind tunnel was giving us one reading and the simulations another. When I went to the Mercedes factory on the Thursday after Monaco, the engineers were still conducting that analysis, so all I could do was ask further questions and give more feedback.”
Their work was rewarded in Montreal as Hamilton acknowledged. “We made no fault in the direction we went with the settings,” he said “I was hoping that all that work would pay off and it did. It was really down to the team, great minds working together, communicating.”
The team’s executive director Toto Wolff recognised how well the package had come together but also that there was more work to be done. “If you give Lewis a car that he likes he is just stellar,” he said. “But there is no silver bullet in this sport. It is about analysing data. We looked at all areas. There was no stone left unturned: aero, mechanical balance, set-up work, the tyres themselves, the way the drivers drove the car. This is not an instinct business, this is a scientific business. Every mile we drive will make us perform better and hopefully to be good enough to compete for the championship.”
The next round in Azerbaijan takes place on 25 June and Hamilton can head into it with more confidence but insists he and the team will continue the efforts that have engendered such a remarkable their turnaround. “Baku is another circuit that is very smooth, like Russia. I wasn’t quick in Russia so for us getting the car where we need it is going to be a challenge,” he said.
“But we learned a lot from Monaco and we learned a lot this weekend. If we apply the same diligence that we did in the past two weeks after every single race, even after a win, we’re sure that we can continue to fight and maybe make it not quite such a rollercoaster ride.”Mercedes’ jubilation was in stark contrast to the anger emerging from the McLaren garage after another dismal weekend. Fernando Alonso was two laps away from scoring his first point of the campaign, only for his Honda engine to expire. The British team’s executive director, Zak Brown, upped the ante on Honda earlier in the week by labelling the beleaguered Japanese manufacturer as “lost” before Eric Boullier, the team’s racing director, added further fuel to the fire. “For the first time this season, running in 10th place within spitting distance of the flag, we dared to hope,” Boullier said.
“OK, what we were daring to hope for were hardly rich pickings: a solitary world championship point for Fernando, who had driven superbly all afternoon, as he’s driven superbly every race-day afternoon for the past two and a half years. But after so much toil and heartache even that single point would have felt like a victory, and then came yet another gut-wrenching failure.
“It’s difficult to find the right words to express our disappointment, our frustration and, yes, our sadness. So I’ll say only this: it’s simply and absolutely not good enough.”
McLaren are in the third year of a 10-year deal with Honda but their relationship seems at breaking point.
