Hamilton explains strategy miscue which caused early F1 Azerbaijan GP qualifying exit

“We didn’t have the right tyre on at the end.”

That was a downcast Lewis Hamilton’s assessment of why he was eliminated from qualifying for the Formula 1 Azerbaijan Grand Prix. The reasons for him being on the wrong tyre are mysterious.

For this weekend, Pirelli has brought tyre compounds a step softer than last year, including the new C6 it introduced in Imola. But, given the small performance step between that and the C5, and the teams’ relative unfamiliarity with the new soft tyre, it was expected that the medium compound would be preferred in the critical moments of qualifying.

Ferrari appeared to be caught out when Q2 restarted after the fourth red flag of a disrupted qualifying session. With just over 12 minutes left to run, Hamilton and team-mate Charles Leclerc were the first to emerge from the pitlane – but Leclerc was on C5s, Hamilton on C6s.

Hamilton was then unable to summon a quick enough lap from the unpredictable soft tyres and was knocked out by Fernando Alonso; having lapped 0.787s off Norris’s benchmark time, he was in 10th place and vulnerable when Alonso escaped the bottom five. Leclerc subsequently compounded the issue by breaking out of the drop zone too.

“Honestly, I’m obviously so disappointed,” said Hamilton afterwards. “Yesterday [when Hamilton led Leclerc to a 1-2 in FP2] the car was feeling good, today there was some direction that we ended up going which on paper looked like it was the best place for us to be.

“And ultimately, our pace had been good, we’d been progressing, I was feeling really on it, didn’t make any mistakes, you didn’t see me go down any exit roads, it was just that we didn’t have the right tyre on at the end – and it’s tough. 

“Everyone ahead of me basically had the medium tyre on, but I lost a medium tyre in FP2 and due to our run plan, and that put me on the back foot.”

It is understood that Hamilton was marginal on fuel and would not have been able to complete another lap as the clock ticked down in Q2 – given that he had already had a push lap on the C6s anyway, the question was academic. But could he have taken one of the mediums being held back?

“I wanted to,” he explained. “But they said that the warm-up was too long or something like that, so then we ran out of time and then ran out of fuel.

“So not great, but we’ll take it internal. As I said, there’s been lots of positives from this weekend, I’ve really felt on it. I honestly thought I was going to be shooting for a pole today and so it’s kind of a bit of a shock, but I’ll take it on a chin and keep trying.”

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari

Photo by: Joe Portlock / LAT Images via Getty Images

The main issue with the C6s, apart from the marginal lap time gain over the C5s, has been their vulnerability to spikes in surface temperature – one meaningful slide, a frequent occurrence on a circuit with 20 corners, can be terminal in terms of peak performance.

Although the C5 mediums were felt to be the better tyre, they generally required two warm-up laps in preparation for a push. Hamilton would therefore have been marginal for time, let alone fuel, had he been able to swap after his first push lap on the C6s.

But questions will remain over Ferrari’s judgement – especially since several teams were running used mediums and still felt they were more effective than C6s.