Formula 1: 5 mistakes that cost Lewis Hamilton the championship

Mercedes made four key mistakes that cost Lewis Hamilton the Formula 1 world championship, and Max Verstappen made one that actually helped his cause.

The controversy surrounding last Sunday’s 2021 season-ending and Formula 1 world championship-deciding race at the 16-turn, 3.281-mile (5.280-kilometer) Yas Marina Circuit road course on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates will certainly last through the offseason and beyond.

On the very first lap, Max Verstappen dove inside Lewis Hamilton entering turn six and forced his rival off the track, prompting a debate as to whether Hamilton should have had to give the place back.

Red Bull’s lobbying was fruitless, but race control’s response indicated that the policy for the day would be to actually let the championship be decided on the track. Hamilton was much faster all night, but a series of bad decisions on the pit wall ultimately overwhelmed his on-track advantage.

When race director Michael Masi made the call to clear only the lapped cars that were between the two title contenders before a final lap of racing, Mercedes had a scapegoat for their consistently awful approach to the entire race weekend.

In the end, team leadership at Mercedes had no one to blame but themselves.

And if it had not been for a potentially devastating on-track mistake during qualifying, Verstappen and Red Bull may not have even been in a strategic position to win the race — and his first world championship.

All of this makes Mercedes’ refusal to attend the season-ending FIA prize-giving gala seem like the petulant act of an organization unwilling to admit their own shortcomings, which comes as no surprise to anyone who follows the sport.

There were several key moments in which Toto Wolff and Peter Bonnington failed their driver and their team with conservative decisions. That manner of leadership won them championships when their cars and drivers were head and shoulders ahead of the field, but those days are apparently gone.

Where Mercedes hesitated, Red Bull pounced — repeatedly. The gap in decision making was clearly noticeable throughout the weekend.

Here are five mistakes that ultimately cost Mercedes and Hamilton.

Mistake number 1: No teamwork during qualifying

It’s hard to win a modern Formula 1 race on Sunday without also excelling in qualifying on Saturday. Max Verstappen took 10 pole positions to Hamilton’s five over the 22-race season, and he was in the favored slot on Sunday at lights out.

He also had his teammate, Sergio Perez, right behind him, while Valtteri Bottas, in his last race as Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes teammate, qualified in sixth place, a row too far back to make a difference at the start. Bottas fell to eighth by turn three and quickly became a non-factor in the race.

But a keener look back at Saturday’s events reveals a pattern: Red Bull made decisions that elevated both drivers and moved the team forward, while Mercedes prioritized Hamilton.

On the second run in Q3, Mercedes put Hamilton in clear air ahead of his teammate for his fast laps, while Perez towed Verstappen through the track’s second sector, where Mercedes had been whipping them thoroughly through practice and qualifying.

Perez then ducked out of the way before the hotel section, allowing Verstappen to sling past him while also giving himself enough time and space to get back up to speed and, with aerodynamic assistance from his now-content teammate, turn in a final lap good enough for P4.

Coupled with a solid start on soft tires that put him ahead of Lando Norris and into P3 by turn 3, that put Perez in position to help Verstappen 20 laps later.

That brilliant stretch of laps 20 and 21 during which Perez battled Hamilton, allowing Verstappen to close the gap to his rival from 11 seconds to less than a second and a half, transformed this race from a runaway Mercedes win to a nail-biter in a matter of three minutes.

This brilliant display between Perez and Hamilton was one of the most exciting on-track battles all season, but Hamilton called it “dangerous driving.”

Hamilton, of all people, should know that aggressive does not equal dangerous; a younger Hamilton stuck his front wing in plenty of places it shouldn’t have fit. It’s one of the reasons why he had seven titles going into Sunday’s race.

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.

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.

Mistake number 4: Mercedes not giving up track position under VSC

Antonio Giovinazzi’s failing Alfa Romeo was the catalyst for Mercedes’ second blunder, bringing out a virtual safety car on lap 36. At that point, Hamilton was about six seconds ahead of Verstappen and both were still on their hard tires.

To stop under the VSC would have cost Hamilton about 14 seconds and the lead, but it would have forced Red Bull into another tough call of their own. Hamilton seemed to favor a pit stop, but he was told to stay out while Verstappen pitted behind him for fresh hard tires.

Had Mercedes brought Hamilton in initially, Red Bull would have been forced to leave Verstappen out to take the lead. The final laps then would have been run opposite to what they were, with Verstappen on fading tires trying to hold off a charging Hamilton.

Mercedes still had an opportunity to pit at the end of the next lap, and their fans across the globe must have been shouting and throwing things at their broadcast devices of choice when they opted not to.

Hamilton had been almost half a second per lap faster than Verstappen all race and would have had around 20 laps to make up about eight seconds on far fresher tires. How a team that had won seven straight championships, six with this very driver, lacked the confidence to give him a chance to win on the race track is truly baffling. But Mercedes clearly hadn’t done a lot of introspection.

We all saw the lap times, but only Mercedes chose to set them aside for track position, which is like Bitcoin in that it is, at once, immensely valuable and totally worthless.

Verstappen took a sharp bite out of Hamilton’s lead after his second stop, but his gains had slowed by around lap 45 or so. Despite the clear errors by his team, it looked like Hamilton was going to disappear into the lights of Yas Marina and claim his eighth championship.

But the ghost of the great Michael Schumacher’s career — and the living bodies of his son Mick and Nicholas Latifi — had other plans for this Sunday, and the two backmarkers touched, sending Latifi off course to dirty up his tires.

His subsequent spin and contact with the wall brought out the fateful safety car that will be haunting Hamilton’s dreams and fueling media and fan debate until we are all but wisps in the wind.

Mistake number 5: Mercedes had one last opportunity…

Nicholas Latifi’s crash and the safety car that followed him have gotten far too much of the attention since Sunday, and perhaps the fairest outcome would have been for Michael Masi to red flag the race and let the championship be decided from a three or four-lap mini-race from a standing start.

Hamilton still would have had his lead, and the drivers would have literally been on equal footing with fresh soft tires, due to the rule that allows for free tire changes during a red flag period.

Race control instead opted to keep the cars circulating behind the safety car, which led to the flash point for the whole weekend: the late change in decision to let the lapped traffic in between the two championship contenders, but not the rest of the lapped cars, clear the safety car before racing was resumed with just one lap remaining.

So we got Verstappen on fresh soft tires flying past Hamilton into turn five and scrambling to defend on cold tires, which brought perhaps the most dramatic 20 seconds in Formula 1 history as the two swapped tire markings through turn nine before Verstappen pulled away for the win.

When Latifi crashed and the safety car had come out, Hamilton was just 11 seconds clear of Verstappen, so he again would have given up the lead by stopping for new tires.

Mercedes could certainly be forgiven for not bringing him initially; had they done so and the race ended under yellow, they might have been driven from the sport by the inevitable scorn.

But once Verstappen came in for fresh soft tires, Mercedes and Hamilton were at the mercy of Masi and the race stewards.

Instead of putting his track position at risk to give him a chance to drive his way to a championship, Mercedes put him in an impossible position, one from which he still almost emerged triumphant.

In placing their trust in that the race would either end behind the safety car or be restarted with a five-car buffer for Verstappen to overcome just to get to the back of Hamilton, Mercedes brought the fatal blow to Hamilton’s hopes and a flood of criticism for all parties involved.

Sir Lewis has long since earned the right to second-guess team leadership, and he often does so openly during races. In this case, every complaint and observation he had about strategy was dead-on correct.

Maybe he needs to be his own team principal; to hear him argue with himself during races would be hilarious. But Mercedes will regardless have to reevaluate their in-race strategy makers, and don’t be surprised if there are a number of new folks in Hamilton’s garage next year and some reassigned ones in George Russell’s.

I just wish Mercedes that would turn their critical gaze and finger-pointing inward and acknowledge that they made several colossal strategic mistakes. Instead, we got a boycott of the awards gala and a childlike threat to take their legendary seven-time champion driver and go home.

I would wager all of my functioning limbs and unborn children that Hamilton will be back to battle Verstappen in the 2022 Formula 1 season, despite rumors of retirement. We can only hope for another down-to-the-wire championship fight; hopefully one with less whining.