Did Haas driver Nico Hulkenberg indirectly contribute to the final position of Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton in Formula 1 qualifying in Australia? According to Hamilton, the German was a factor because before the last attempt in Q3, Hamilton and Hulkenberg did not quite agree on the track about the right of way: Hamilton wanted to overtake, Hulkenberg blocked. He probably stopped Hamilton.
The scene was “definitely a bit confusing,” Hamilton said at the press conference. He speaks of “not an optimal start to the round” because he was unable to drive “the normal pace” in the last sector due to the encounter with Hulkenberg.
The data confirm Hamilton’s impression: he went into his final qualifying attempt after a warm-up lap of 1:32.111 minutes because Hülkenberg had needed 1:32.648 minutes in front of him. Hamilton’s Mercedes team-mate George Russell, on the other hand, completed the warm-up lap in 1:29.935 minutes and was therefore significantly faster.
The impact on Hamilton’s lap
The consequence for Hamilton: “The start of my lap wasn’t as good as before. At first we lacked a bit of temperature [in den Reifen]. It only got better towards the end of the round.”
In fact, in the first sector, Hamilton traded a large part of the gap that he had at the finish on his Mercedes colleague Russell, namely around a tenth of a second until turn 4. Hamilton then got into a deficit of up to 0.260 seconds, even going in the penultimate corner briefly ahead against Russell, only to finish 0.136s down the line.
But he doesn’t blame Hülkenberg, but says: “Sometimes that’s how it works.”
What the team bosses say about qualifying
Especially since, according to Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff, it was unclear for a long time which strategy would be the best in qualifying. “Choosing the right laps” was the most difficult task for the command post, Wolff explains on ‘Sky’.
His team initially expected a long lead time for the final lap: Mercedes assumed that “only the third or fourth” lap would be decisive. “In the end it was the second with only one warm-up lap, and that wasn’t exactly trivial,” says Wolff.
Meanwhile, Haas team boss Günther Steiner finds a few words of criticism towards Hamilton. There was “no need” for Hamilton “to drive so close to Nico at the beginning of the last fast lap and to try to overtake,” said Steiner. “Lewis wasn’t on a fast lap.”