The frustration with Lewis’s Monaco race was he spent almost all of it in traffic,
he didn’t get many laps to show what he could actually do.
Why did we not stop Lewis sooner when we had seen Gasly putting in good lap times on that
Intermediate tyre?
Well, it was all about what was happening behind Lewis on track, and he never actually
had a clear stop window.
If he had a clear window, we would have definitely done it earlier and we knew that the Intermediate
would perform well.
The question is, can a car on Intermediates overtake a car on Wets?
And we saw with Lewis when we eventually went for that with Esteban it was a very difficult
thing to do.
Why were George’s times on the Hard tyre so good, yet the times on the Medium were
still seeing that gap to the lead cars?
Well, it’s fair to say we were encouraged by those times on the Hard tyre, not just
the lap times he was putting in, but also the warm-up looked very strong, he was getting
the tyre to work well.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get many laps of that before we saw the red flag stoppage,
so, at that point we decided to switch to the Medium tyre for the start, that would
give us better performance in the opening laps.
We felt that it would be okay to go to the end of the race, but actually what you saw
on our car and on quite a few others was that that softer compound was graining a bit, it
was taking out the front tyres, costing a bit of grip and at the end of the race George
was actually pretty close to being overtaking by Lando who had come in for another set.
So, the main reason was really just the durability of that tyre in the cool conditions and the
effect of that graining.
Why did we do different strategies with the drivers, so with Lewis using the Intermediate
tyre to bridge between Wets and Slick tyres and with George we went straight from Wet
to Slick?
The reality was the cars around them and what their race situation was.
With George, had he done that he would have dropped two positions on track and at Monaco,
you don’t want to lose those positions because if you can’t get through, there is no way
of recovering it.
And with Lewis, it was really that we had nothing to lose.
We could see that the Alpines were going to try and get through with Alonso from Wet straight
to Slick so we decided to give it a go because it all hinged on whether Lewis could recover
that position he was going to drop to Esteban, and whether there was anything to gain by
being able to post quicker times on that Intermediate tyres but as I said, it was really down to
the differing situations between the cars and who would lose the most places doing the
extra stop.
How much performance did Lewis lose with the damage to the front wing from the contact
with Esteban?
Well, it wasn’t too big a number.
Looking at the data we get off the car, it was around one to two tenths of a second.
So not large and conveniently the red flag allows us to repair any accident damage, so
we could swap that front wing without actually having any time penalty for doing the work
during a pit stop.
More pleasing was that that was the only damage that we had over the course of the Monaco
weekend.
So, really good job by both drivers to bring the cars home more or less intact.
Why did Lewis change his helmet under the red flag?
In those very dark wet conditions at the start of the race, they are running a clear visor
and that gives them the best visibility in the spray.
When you get into the dry race, also the sun is a lot lower in the sky, the end of the
race was near six o’clock in the evening and he then moves to a tinted visor just because
it gives you better visibility, better contrast but also you avoid getting the sun in your
eyes.
If it wasn’t for the Alpines would Lewis have had the pace to be in that battle for
fifth with George and Lando?
Almost certainly yes, the frustration with Lewis’s Monaco race was that he spent almost
all of it in traffic, he didn’t get many laps to show what he could actually do but
the car was working reasonably well, we haven’t got the pace there to compete with the Ferrari
and the Red Bull but certainly he would have been in amongst that battle with George and
with Lando.
Why didn’t George follow Norris in pitting to take a new set of tyres to go for the fastest
lap?
This comes down to what was fitted at the restart on that red flag, we decided to put
George on the Medium tyre for the warm-up.
You saw Lando go for the harder tyre and that also had been used earlier in the race.
So, the converse is that the options for the pit stop, Lando had a new Medium available
to him, George only had a used Hard tyre and that was really why we didn’t decide to
come in and go for the fastest lap.
Now, what we hadn’t expected were Lando’s times to be sustained at such a high rate,
we hadn’t expected him to be so close to George at the end of the race.
If we had known that, with hindsight we would have come in and taken the used Hard even
if we weren’t going to be in the fight for fastest lap.
What were the take homes from the Monaco Grand Prix weekend and the expectations for Baku?
Certainly, it was a lot harder to get the car to work around Monaco than it was in Barcelona.
In Barcelona we had shown that we had good race pace, even though we know there is still
work to do to close the gap to Red Bull and to Ferrari but the challenge of Monaco is
the low speed nature, it’s a very bumpy circuit and we were struggling with the ride
of the car.
That was affecting the confidence of the drivers to carry speed and it just meant that we couldn’t
run it as close to optimum as we had been able to do in Spain.
Baku might present some similar challenges, we are working on areas though to try and
improve that ride, try and be able to run the car a bit closer to its optimum window
but we are well aware that in addition to adding base performance to the car, we’ve
got to make it work over a wider range of circuits.
So, these are all things that we are busy with in the next week in preparation for Baku
but also longer term because there are other challenging tracks that will come up.
But all of those projects are being worked on really hard because the team and the drivers
are desperate to get back to the front.
Thank you very much for all of your questions, we will be back in a couple of weeks’ time
to answer more from the Baku Grand Prix.