Formula 1: 5 mistakes that cost Lewis Hamilton the championship

Mistake number 2: Max Verstappen’s Saturday lock-up

Let’s shift focus from Mercedes for a moment and look at how Max Verstappen’s biggest mistake of the weekend actually put him in the only strategic position from which he could beat Lewis Hamilton.

Both teams ran medium compound tires in their first Q2 run, as drivers who qualify in the top 10  must start the race on the very same tires with which they made their fastest Q2 laps. They presumably had the intent to run a one-stop strategy, going from medium tires to hard tires about one-third of the way through the race.

But Verstappen flat-spotted his medium tires near the end of his second hot lap, and Red Bull clearly felt that the damage was too great to risk starting the race on those tires. So they sent Verstappen and Perez out on soft tires for their second Q2 runs.

Those tires didn’t give Verstappen the jump on Hamilton at the start of the race, but Perez was able to slip by Lando Norris into third place, putting him in a position to leapfrog Hamilton after his first pit stop — more on that in a moment — and back him into Verstappen a few laps later.

The soft tires’ lack of durability forced Verstappen onto an alternate strategy. His Red Bull was clearly the second fastest car on the track, and had he run the same tire sequence as Hamilton, he surely wouldn’t have been celebrating last week.

It very well may be that Verstappen’s biggest error of the weekend was necessary for him to even be in a position to win in the first place, a win he still wouldn’t have earned if it had not been for Mercedes’ three tactical mistakes on Sunday.