Lando Norris
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Lewis Hamilton lost second place at the British Grand Prix after Ferrari decided to pit him under a safety car.
Ferrari were on course for a one-two finish when Kimi Antonelli’s car damage forced him to make two pit stops, demoting him to the lower points places. Max Verstappen’s DNF removed the threat Hamilton was facing from behind.
However, the safety car was deployed when Verstappen beached his Red Bull in the gravel, leaving Ferrari with a dilemma on lap 48 out of 52. They called Hamilton in, and Mercedes naturally did the opposite with George Russell behind.
What are your thoughts on the British Grand Prix ending behind the safety car?
Lewis Hamilton felt he didn’t have all the information before late British Grand Prix stop
Hamilton came out a fraction behind Russell and, controversially, the race was not restarted. That denied him the chance to attack the Mercedes driver.
Russell acknowledges that Hamilton would have passed him if there had been one more lap. But because lapped cars weren’t given the signal to overtake until lap 51, there wasn’t enough time to get going again under the regulations.
Asked whether he should have stayed out in the post-race press conference, Hamilton said: “What difference does it make?”
What do you make of Ferrari’s call to pit Lewis Hamilton under the late safety car?
That was a surprising response given that, as the journalist subsequently pointed out, he clearly lost three points. After Antonelli’s non-score, Hamilton closed the gap at the top of the standings to 32 points, but if he does fight for the title, he may rue the ending at Silverstone.
While he didn’t criticise Ferrari directly, he says he didn’t have all the information when he peeled into the pits
He added: “I mean, the team asked me to stop. I assumed in stopping that we would be holding position. If they told me, ‘You’re stopping and you’re losing position,’ I wouldn’t have done it.”
Ferrari say it was always likely to be a marginal call at that stage of the race. Indeed, had the instruction to the lapped cars been issued a matter of seconds earlier, there would have been another racing lap.
This goes down as an error but, if they hadn’t pitted and Hamilton had lost positions to Russell and potentially Lando Norris behind on old tyres, the criticism would have been even greater.
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