The "big, big question" Hamilton wants answered by Mercedes

Lewis Hamilton

The "big, big question" Hamilton wants answered by Mercedes

Hamilton suffered from tyre issues in Monaco

Ian Parkes

Saturday 29 May 2021 08:01

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Lewis Hamilton has called on Mercedes to answer the "big, big question" regarding his car's tyre anomalies that could continue to have a damaging impact on his F1 title chances.

Technical director James Allison has stated that for whatever reason, Mercedes has always struggled to get its tyres to work around a venue such as Monaco. Singapore has often been another outlier in the past.

The drop off in performance of Pirelli's rubber resulted in Hamilton trailing home in a lowly seventh at the end of a Monaco Grand Prix won by Red Bull's Max Verstappen who also claimed the lead of the drivers' championship.

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Hamilton is hoping Mercedes can seek solutions to ensure there is no repeat of what he encountered around the streets of the Principality.

"People know we struggle with our tyres in cold conditions," said Hamilton. "For whatever reasons, we couldn’t get our tyres working the way others could.

"But then at the same time, they [Mercedes' rivals] are able to have really good long runs or race pace, so that is a big, big question of how we are utilising the tyres on tracks like Monaco.

“Obviously, in previous races, we’ve generally been relatively good on the tyres but that one particularly has been weak, so that is an area we need to try and understand and rectify for the future."

Mercedes and Hamilton to hold "constructive discussion"

Hamilton maintains that ahead of next weekend's race in Baku he and the team will have discussed the ways to move forward after what was one of the team's worst weekends since the introduction of the turbo-hybrid era in 2014.

“We don’t like to kick each other when we are down," added Hamilton. "There’s no finger-pointing so there is no individual that takes the blame. We win and we lose as a team.

“We have a very open discussion, very open and honest. It’s not a personal thing. It’s like ‘Hey man, this should have been better, this should have been better. Can we do this? Why didn’t we do this?’.

“We all take everything on board and it’s constructive discussion and if there is any constructive criticism we take it on board and we just huddle up, we do the work, we get on a call."