I'm afraid I don't have the statistics on that.
I didn’t actually have any but I did find out after the event they were giving them
away in the paddock.
Describe your weekend in one word?
Well, that's easy.
Orange.
I've never seen so much orange in one place but thank you very much to all the Dutch fans
for making us feel at home and welcoming us and I am glad that it was a great race weekend.
How difficult was it to prepare for the race with all those red flags?
Well it does add to the challenge and in particular this year, where we only have one hour in
the morning, one hour in the afternoon on the Friday.
And with that constraint, we are pretty much busy all the time, we are running shortly
after the pitlane opens and right up until the session finishes.
Any red flag takes time out of that and it means there is an impact on your learning,
either less high fuel running or less low fuel running, and that challenge was particularly
significant for Lewis because he was the cause of one of those red flags in the second session.
He lost almost all of that session.
So, he in particular was a bit on the backfoot going into Saturday.
Is there any update on Lewis's Power Unit after the issue he had?
Not at the moment.
That Power Unit has come back, it's now at HPP in Brixworth and they are going to start
looking into it.
Now, fortunately that was a unit that had finished the end of its useful race, it wasn’t
even scheduled to do further running on a Friday from here on forward but we just want
to understand the situation with it because it isn’t to say it wouldn’t appear as
a spare in the future and we are just awaiting that report from HPP.
What is the experience of driving those banked corners like for the drivers?
It does change the dynamics of the car a bit.
The final corner is actually quite trivial from the driver's point of view.
It's not difficult to find the line through there and given that they are used to sort
of experiencing those normal g-forces, the only difference is the banked corners put
a bit more vertical load, where it is sort of squashing them down into the seat.
But otherwise, it is quite normal for them.
The particular challenge here though was that Turn 2/3 combination, there is quite a lot
of warp in the track and it is also quite a lot of variability that you can play with
on the line and the tricky bit is understanding the combination of the line that you want
to drive and also any set-up tweaks that you might want to put on the car to get it to
handle in exactly the way they want.
For us the focus really through Friday and into Saturday was trying to optimise Turn
2 and Turn 3.
Would we have been better putting Valtteri on the Hard tyre for his stop?
Well, we had Lewis on a two-stop strategy and Max also on that two-stop strategy.
We wanted to keep Valtteri on a one stop because we didn’t know whether there would be Safety
Cars or VSCs that may create an opportunity, but the reality was that he had such a big
gap to the cars behind him, he had a free stop anyway.
We knew the Medium tyre was working well on our car and that was why we decided to go
with it but even so he had the gap, he was able to take another Soft tyre at the end.
Whatever we did it wasn’t going to change his finishing position.
Are we happy with the lap that we chose to make Lewis's second stop?
After a race weekend we always go through these decisions and ask ourselves the question
was there anything that we could have done that was better and we'll do that in this
instance, but the basic problem was that if we had left it later and later, at some point
Max was going to stop anyway.
So, you would lose the ability to attempt an undercut and if we brought it earlier and
earlier, the risk is that Lewis would have run out of tyres towards the end of the race
and you can't mount any kind of credible challenge.
That was the reason that we knew we were going to have to drop into backmarker traffic.
Now, given that you are not racing these cars, it all depends a bit on how quickly, how efficiently
they get out of the way and it is fair to say that we did lose quite a critical chunk
of time, but the strategy group now are going to be taking the race data, they are going
to be reconstructing the tyre curves and we will then forecast what would have happened
if we had gone a few laps later, a few laps earlier and that's all part of the process
of using our experience of racing to try and learn and improve each race.
That work will get done over the next day or two.
Why didn’t we go for the Hard tyre for that second pit stop?
The Medium was working well on our car on that stint, and we were also the only team
to have two Medium tyres in the race allocation.
We felt that that was a bit of a strength, which is why we wanted to go for it.
The other issue with the Hard is you normally have a more difficult warm-up phase, you are
less able to make an undercut work with it even if it does have a bit more life.
But really linking in with that previous question, we will reconstruct those tyre curves and
then we can actually give the proper answer of would it have been better to be on that
tyre.
But the reality is, Red Bull had a little bit quicker car on the day, we were behind
on track.
And in that situation, is it actually very difficult to make up the opportunity to pass,
especially on a circuit like Zandvoort where it is incredibly hard to overtake on track.
Was there an opportunity to stop Lewis for a Soft tyre 25 laps from the end and do something
similar to Budapest in 2019 or what we did in Barcelona this year?
Well, the reality with this race was most people were actually making it a one stop,
a one stop that needed some management.
You saw up at the front Lewis and Max were pushing those tyres harder, they were on the
two-stop strategy.
And while that was viable, it was potentially even the fastest way to do the race, when
you make that extra stop there isn’t enough tyre degradation to make up the fact that
you have got another 20 seconds or so in the pits.
The reality is the third stop wouldn’t have worked, we are monitoring these things live,
we're always looking at every opportunity that we can to try and generate some strategic
advantage, but what we could see in this instance was you'd make that third stop, you'd drop
back and you'd never even catch back up during the remainder of the race.
Why did we pit Valtteri for the Soft tyres towards the end of the race?
He said he picked up a little bit of vibration, which is quite normal when you take the tyres
up to high mileage, they get a little bit out of balance.
And as we talked about it earlier there was no one in his window behind, he had a clear
window to make a pit stop, to hold onto that podium position.
So, really it was a precautionary stop, there was no reason not to do it and that was why
we decided to call him in.
How many stroopwafels did the Mercedes team eat while we were in Holland?
I'm afraid I don't have the statistics on that.
I didn’t actually have any but I did find out after the event they were giving them
away in the paddock.
So, I obviously missed that opportunity.
I have got a tin of them that a got from the hotel, but they are in my bag on the way to
Monza but when I get back from Monza, I look forward to eating those.
Thank you for all of your questions and we will be back in a weeks’ time after the
Italian Grand Prix.