25/08/2024
NEWS STORY
George Russell finished P7 and Lewis Hamilton P8 in Sunday's Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort. They lined up P4 and P14 respectively on the grid; Lewis receiving a three-place grid penalty for impeding another car in Qualifying.
Both gained positions on the opening lap, with George jumping the Ferrari of Charles Leclerc for P3. Lewis meanwhile set about carving through the field and cycled through to P9 before his first stop. Once others had pitted, he had made his way up to P8. George meanwhile was undercut by Leclerc and was unable to resist the McLaren of Oscar Piastri in his middle stint. Struggling on the Hard compound tyre, George made a second stop onto the Soft tyre and rejoined ahead of his team-mate who had done the same five laps earlier. They pushed hard in the final laps to close down Sergio Perez and Carlos Sainz ahead but were unable to do so. The team's attention now turns towards next week's Italian Grand Prix at Monza.
George Russell: Today's race was an odd one. We didn't have the pace and that was the case on all three tyre compounds. It felt that I was sliding around quite a lot, suffering from high degradation, and slowly went backwards. We will have to understand why that was as we were relatively quick on Saturday. Performance does swing circuit to circuit, but we have been up near the front in the past six races. I am therefore confident that this is an outlier.
We will get to work immediately to understand why we were slower than our competitors today. We have another race next weekend in Monza and we will aim to put in a much better showing there.
Lewis Hamilton: We knew today was all about damage limitation. We managed to work our way back into the points but ultimately, we didn't have the pace to fight for much more today. If we had qualified better yesterday, than it may have been a little different. I enjoyed getting past several cars though and putting the Soft tyre to use in that opening stint. It felt good to move forwards but I'm a little disappointed as if we had a better Saturday, then the fight would have been for more points.
Strategy wise, we were looking at running to the end on the one-stop. I had a lock-up on the Hard tyre though and that meant we switched to the two-stop. It was a shame to lose the point for fastest lap at the end, but I should have put in a quicker effort earlier on.
Toto Wolff, Team Principal & CEO: We had a bad race today. It was quite a contrast to the previous Grand Prix in Spa where we had set the pace and finished first and second on track. We clearly got some decisions wrong in terms of how we were running the car here. We will evaluate that quickly so we can avoid another race like this. It is bruising. Sometimes it is good to be bruised though to take a step forward.
With George, we switched to a two-stop strategy as he was running out of tyre in his second stint. That higher degradation was likely in part due to some set-up decisions we took. We will need to do a full analysis to understand how much of it was down to that or other factors. With Lewis, we planned a two-stop race for him, although we were evaluating the one-stop midway through. However, he suffered a lock up on the Hard tyre and, with no risk behind, we switched him onto the two-stop strategy. His pace was good throughout though and that gives us encouragement. There is clearly lots of learning we can take from this weekend and hopefully we can bounce back next weekend in Monza.
Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director: Overall, it has been a poor weekend. We will go away and pick through the data to understand why we were off the pace both in qualifying and race trim. Today we were lacking the speed to fight for much more than we achieved. We were not generating good grip and, consequently, were sliding around on the tyre. That led to higher degradation than our competitors and forced us into a two-stop race. We were on the back foot today, but we will be working hard to ensure that isn't the case next weekend in Monza.
Check out our Sunday gallery from Zandvoort here.