Mercedes have admitted they made a “mistake” in bringing Lewis Hamilton in earlier after the seven-time World Champion voiced his displeasure at the Singapore strategy call.

Hamilton was the only driver in the top 13 to begin the Singapore Grand Prix on softs but stopped far earlier than he would have hoped, losing any advantage he may have gained from the tactical choice.

Mercedes explain Lewis Hamilton Singapore strategy call

Hamilton bemoaned the decision, suggesting that it made “no sense”, after he finished sixth and behind team-mate George Russell.

“We sat in our meeting in the morning of the race – actually the night before they already mentioned that they would like to split the cars – and for me, I was a bit perplexed by it,” Hamilton said at an event in Kuala Lumpur for Mercedes sponsor Petronas.

“In the past when we’ve been in that position, normally, if George has qualified well like he normally does that and I’m out of the top 10 or something then we will split the strategies. But when we were so close, it didn’t make sense to me.

“So I battled as hard as I could to fight to go on the medium tyre but the team continued to suggest that I start on the soft. And then they took the tyre blankets off and everyone was on mediums.”

Mercedes technical director James Allison admitted that it was a “mistake” and that a different call would be made could if they turn back time.

“Before I give the explanation, I’ll just start off by saying we shouldn’t have started on the softs. That was a mistake. If we could turn back time, we would do what those around us did and select the mediums.

“The reasoning was that the soft tyre very often allows you to get away from the start abruptly and allows you a good chance of jumping a place or two in the opening laps of the race. We had no real expectation before the race that we were going to suffer the sort of difficulties that we then experienced on the soft rubber. So, we imagined we would get the upside of the soft rubber, of getting a place or two.

“We didn’t, because that just isn’t the way the starts played out. And then we hoped that the downside of the soft being a bit more fragile wouldn’t really play out particularly badly because on the whole, if you look back over the years in Singapore, on the whole the pace starts very, very easy at a Singapore race and the drivers then build up the pace over many, many laps, leaving a soft tyre perfectly okay to run relatively deep into the pit window.

“So, we didn’t get the places at the start, the pace started building up from around about lap five and that left Lewis with a car that was not particularly happy anyway, suffering from quite poor tyre degradation and needing to come in early as a consequence and really ruined his race for him. Yeah, so just a clear mistake.”

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Allison also admitted that the team did consider using a set of new mediums for Hamilton but ultimately felt that it would not have yielded much lap time.

He said: “It was considered, it was certainly there as a great weapon had there been a safety car at an opportune moment in the race, that would have been one of the upsides of that strategy but once embarked upon the soft-hard strategy, we were considering changing to a two-stop for Lewis at various points during the race.

“But, although that would have put him out on fresher rubber and he would have been swift on that fresher rubber, all our calculations suggested that he would not actually have gained back the pit stop loss.

“So it was there in the hutch, could have used it, would have been good at a safety car but in a normal uninterrupted race, which for the first time in forever we got in Singapore, that tyre was not a thing that would have helped Lewis’ weekend.”

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