Championship Points Squandered - Will it Cost Hamilton the F1 Title?

Max Verstappen is now leading the F1 world championship by a healthy 32 points after winning the Austrian grandprix. The standings however could have been a lot different if Lewis Hamilton had not committed a couple of massive blunders or performed at a decent level at certain other races. 

The table below outlines the races where points were clearly lost due to driver error or performance. A detailed explanation follows, providing an objective account of the number of points Hamilton has squandered this season:

1.Emilia Romagna GP - Imola 

The race started in wet conditions with most of the field running intermediate tires. Having started on pole position, Hamilton had been running in a comfortable second place after having been beaten into the first corner by Max Verstappen who had started from 3rd on the grid. 

Several drivers including Hamilton and Verstappen then switched over to dry tires almost half distance into the race, once a dry line began to form on the circuit. As the leaders came up to lap the back markers, Hamilton was too eager in lapping the Williams of George Russell and slithered off the track and into the gravel trap. To make matters worse, he then lost his front wing against the barriers and spent almost a minute selecting reverse before rejoining the circuit a lap down and well out of the points. 

Hamilton was incredibly lucky however that the race was red flagged on the very next lap because of a massive collision between Bottas and Russell. He was therefore able to replace his front wing, put on fresh tires and most importantly unlap himself (silly and unfair FIA rule that allows lapped cars to unlap themselves) and take the restart in 9th place just a few seconds behind Verstappen. 

Given the car advantage he had, it was a relatively easy climb back up the order into second place and 19 points (including fastest lap) and he got away scot free. 

2. Monaco Grandprix

Hamilton struggled in Monaco from the outset and trailed his team mate across most of the practice sessions. He was unable to find the right setup and performed woefully in qualifying, ending up a lowly 7th on the grid. On the contrary, his team mate Bottas qualified just 0.025 seconds behind Verstappen and started the race from 2nd place on the grid. 

The race was much of the same story where Bottas was running in a comfortable 2nd place and would have easily finished in that position but for a stuck wheel nut at his pitstop which forced him to retire. Hamilton on the other hand went backwards in the race and lost positions to Vettel and Perez and was only able to bring home 7 points by finishing 7th.

The narrative from the biased British media was that Mercedes was uncompetitive in Monaco but the obvious truth evident from Valtteri's performance is that 2nd place was clearly within reach and that Hamilton had severely under performed and dropped 11 points (scoring 7 points instead of the 18 that would have been awarded for 2nd place). 

3. Azerbaijan Grandprix

Both Mercedes cars struggled with tire warm up issues. Baku being a street track with short corners and a lengthy straight meant the Mercedes which is inherently kinder on its tires was unable to fire the thermally sensitive Pirelli front tires into the right operating window. Hamilton and Bottas tried different setup solutions with Hamilton going for the low downforce rear wing configuration which worked a charm and he was able to admirably qualify on the front row while his team mate languished in 10th place. 

During the race Hamilton quickly usurped Leclerc who had started on pole and was leading from Max Verstappen and a fast starting Perez who had climbed up from 7th place to 3rd in the opening laps. Hamilton however lost out during the one and only pitstop where both Max and Perez ran a longer first stint and overcut Hamilton, relegating him to 3rd. It was looking like a comfortable 1-2 for Redbull before Max suffered a rear tire blowout at 320 kph and instant retirement just 4 laps from the finish. 

The race was red flagged due to debris and tire safety concerns, and race control decreed a standing restart with 2 laps to run. Perez was on pole for the restart with Hamilton in second but Hamilton got off the line quicker and seemed like he had the measure of Perez, but it all went horribly wrong when he massively locked up his front tires under braking and went straight down the escape road at Turn 1 and rejoined in last place. The explanation was that Hamilton had inadvertently flicked a 'Brake Magic' switch which moved his brake bias all the way forward, thereby causing the lock up (separate article coming up which exposes holes in this theory). 

With his race leading championship rival out of the race, Hamilton was in a position to score 25 points to Verstappen's 0 points but made a colossal driving blunder when presented with an open goal and scored no points himself. Max was set to score 11 points more than Hamilton by finishing first to Hamilton's third before the situation reversed, and Hamilton looked all set to outscore Verstappen by 25 points (a 36 points swing). This was a monumental opportunity and could prove decisive in the championship. 

4. French Grandprix

The undercut that Max Verstappen pulled off on Lewis Hamilton during the French GP was crucial to the outcome of the race. Let's take a look at how this transpired and whether this was a strategic blunder by Mercedes or if driver performance was the difference. People seem to be overlooking Hamilton's performance during this pitstop cycle. 

There are three aspects to a pitstop that the driver influences. 1.The inlap where a driver thrashes the tires he is about to discard and extracts maximum performance. 2. Performance in the pit lane which includes attacking the pit entry, perfect positioning in the pit box and a good getaway without wheelspin. 3. The final component is the outlap where the driver puts in a blistering lap on new tires to gain an advantage over his competitor who is still circulating on old tires.

Hamilton had a 3.1 seconds gap to Max and according to telemetry data and analysis, this is how the undercut panned out. Max's in lap was 0.9 seconds faster. His outlap was 1.8 seconds faster and he gained an additional 0.4 seconds in the pit lane although Max's pitstop was 0.1 seconds slower than Hamilton's. If you sum all this up....0.9 + 1.8 + 0.4.....it equates to 3.1 seconds and shows how the under cut worked.

Now let's look at how Hamilton performed on two fronts:

Inlap - Hamilton's inlap was a whopping 0.9 seconds slower than Max although he was running in clean air and should have matched, bettered or at least been within a couple of tenths of Max's inlap.

Pitlane Performance - Hamilton was poor/conservative on pit entry and had wheelspin on pit exit due to which he cost himself 0.5 seconds (although the Mercedes crew did a faster stop in 2.2 as against Max's 2.3).

The poor inlap and the below average pit entry and exit cost him 1.4 seconds. Mercedes predictions that he would emerge with a lead of around 1.5 seconds were actually accurate but did not materialize because the driver cost them 1.4 seconds. This clearly illustrates that this was not a strategic blunder from Mercedes but a case of Hamilton severely under performing as a driver. Even a half decent inlap within 0.5 seconds or not losing time in the pit lane would have still seen Hamilton easily slot back into the lead. Hamilton in fact emerged ahead by a tenth and was out-braked into the first corner by Verstappen. 

This performance cost him 7 points as he finished second instead of first and increased Max's haul by 7 points (for a net loss of 14 points). Instead of taking the lead of the championship by 3 points, he now trailed by 11. Check the article below for a detailed analysis on this. 

French GP Undercut Analysis

5. Austrian Grandprix

Hamilton had a poor qualifying session in Austria (after being out qualified at the same track by his team mate a week ago) where he got out qualified by a customer car in the form of Norris' Mclaren and ended up in 4th place. 

Having gained a position when Perez ran off the track, Hamilton then passed Norris and was running a comfortable 2nd some 10 seconds behind Verstappen. On lap 30 however, he ran wide over the unforgiving sausage kerbs damaging the floor of his car which upset the balance and induced oversteer, resulting in lap time loss as well as higher tire wear. He was quickly caught and overtaken by both Bottas and Norris and dropped from 2nd place to 4th.

On a day when Max was dominant, Hamilton should have minimized the damage by finishing 2nd but he instead wound up 4th costing himself another 6 points. 

If you add all this up, he should have scored 49 more points (11 more in Monaco, 25 more in Baku, 7 more in France and 6 more in Austria), and should have been leading the championship comfortably by 17 points instead of trailing by 32 points. If we deduct the 7 points where he performed remarkably and took the win in Bahrain against the odds, he should have still been leading by 10 points. 

On top of this, he has been frequently out qualified by Bottas (6:3) and even when he is ahead of Bottas, it is by a very slim margin, unlike Max and Norris who are considerably quicker and dominating their teammates.

The Mercedes is a great car but not enjoying a 1 second advantage like in recent years, and the mediocrity of its drivers is now being exposed both in terms of subpar performances as well as pressure induced errors. Max on the other hand finally has something that he can fight with and he has come home either first or second in every race he has finished this season. 

To drive home this point, take Mclaren as an example....If the highly rated but under performing Ricciardo was paired with somebody like Stroll or Ocon instead of the rapid Norris, everybody would have assumed that the Mclaren was a scrappy car only capable of P8 to P10 and that Ricciardo was extracting the maximum out of it. The same is the case with Mercedes. They have overrated drivers who cannot extract its full potential!