Formula 1: 5 mistakes that cost Lewis Hamilton the championship

Mistake number 3: Mercedes didn’t have to respond immediately

Max Verstappen’s Saturday error put him and Sergio Perez on soft tires at the start. Verstappen wore his down quickly trying to chase down the clearly superior Mercedes of Hamilton after a poor start, while Perez sat back in third place and prepared for his mini battle to come.

Verstappen’s zeal meant that by lap nine, his tires were already sending him distress signals, and by lap 14, he was in the pits for his first set of hard tires. Instead of sticking to their plan A, likely a single stop for hard tires somewhere around one-third of the way through the race, Mercedes chose to bring Hamilton at the end of his next lap to respond to Verstappen.

It seemed clear that this was Red Bull initiating a two-stop plan for Verstappen while keeping Perez on a one-stop strategy. Mercedes chose to abandon half of their carefully crafted race plan and stop early, yet they kept Hamilton on a single-stop strategy.

Hamilton was very pleased with the performance of the medium tires and likely could have easily cruised along for another 15 to 20 laps. It was around that point in the race, on lap 29, that Hamilton radioed to his team that it would be “a long way to go” to the end on his now 15-lap-old hard tires.

Had they waited until this point to pit, Hamilton could have cruised home and would have finished the race on far fresher tires, perhaps giving him the grip he needed to fight off Verstappen on the final lap.

He would almost certainly have been overtaken by Verstappen during his stop and left to chase for a short stint, but it should have been quite clear that Red Bull were committed to, or at least seriously contemplating, a second stop.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say the whole team went color-blind for a moment and couldn’t tell Verstappen’s red-striped soft tires from Hamilton’s yellow-marked medium tires. But that was just the first of Mercedes’ critical strategic blunders.