Sky Sports reporter Ted Kravitz does not believe it would have been worthwhile bringing Sir Lewis Hamilton into the pits late on in the Miami Grand Prix, but questions who is calling the shots at Mercedes.
Hamilton qualified sixth ahead of George Russell in Florida, but the 24-year-old went long on old Hards hoping to capitalise on a Safety Car, which he did when Lando Norris was wiped out by Pierre Gasly.
There appeared to be an element of confusion as to what to do with the seven-time champion though, and Peter Bonnington asked Hamilton whether he wanted to come in, but the Briton did not have any knowledge of whether he had a pit window.
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He was critical of his team after the race, indicating that they might have been more decisive.
“In that scenario, I have no clue where everyone is and so when the team say it’s your choice, I’m like ‘I don’t have the information to make the decision so that’s what your job is! Like make the decision for me, you’ve got all the details, I don’t,’” he told Sky Sports.
“So, that’s what we rely on the guys for but today they gave it to me and I don’t understand it but anyways [I was] just a bit unfortunate on the Safety Car and as I said at least we got points today.
“We’re finishing, reliability is good. We just have to keep trying to… it would be exciting at some stage to take a step forwards which we haven’t yet.”
In the end, Russell used his fresh Mediums to pass his team-mate after having a couple of goes at gaining the position.
Hamilton, meanwhile, only had one set of used Mediums at his disposal having run on them at the start of the race, and there also three sets of used soft tyres available to him.
As a result, Kravitz does not believe there was anything to gain by switching to either one of those compounds.
“There was a bit of confusion under the Safety Car for a possible second stop onto the soft tyres,” he said in his Notebook show after the race.
“[It was] probably right in the end that they didn’t do it because it would have been difficult to overtake even on the soft tyres and even if he had, he probably would have only overtaken George Russell.”
The Briton pondered whether the 37-year-old wants to have quite as much influence over the strategy as he has previously.
“I thought it was interesting there was the confusion. Has there been a sea change in Hamilton directing strategy in the way we saw him do last year?” he queried.
“Has he thought ‘do you know want, I’ve learned from last year – sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, I’ll just leave it to James Vowles and the strategists to get on? You do the strategy, I’ll do the driving’.
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“But we’ll see if that’s something about the mindset that’s changed now they are not fighting for wins and he just wants to leave it up to the team, or whether he was going to do that if they were fighting for wins.”
Russell and Hamilton ended the race fifth and sixth respectively, picking up a solid 18 points after the 37-year-old’s horrible weekend in Imola last time out.