After reading lots of comments from pundits ,experts and others, my thoughts

The crash happened, it’s not deliberate and it’s part of motor racing, it’s pure luck/no luck when it happens, and crashes happen a lot. Red Bull decided to put on soft tyres and Mercedes decided not to – that is a normal race decision. Had Mercedes changed tyres after Red Bull had then both drivers would have pitted during the safety car so presumably would have been in similar track position after both had pitted? I wonder if Mercedes believed the race would end under the safety car so there would be no overtaking and so they avoided the slight risk of a wheel nut gun jamming or something going wrong in the pit lane. Red Bull had no such worries as if they did nothing then Max came second and if it went wrong Max may finish 2nd , 6th or 10th which would be irrelevant.

It does seem strange that under the rules Lewis lapped those 5 cars in normal racing mode which would have cost a few seconds (as the cars pull over) but under those rules Max didn’t have to lap them. To be honest, if those lapped drives had not been permitted to overtake Lewis, then it is likely Max would have overtaken them almost immediately as you would expect them to pull over as they did for Lewis. But what we will never know is would those few seconds have been too much for Max to overtake Lewis or would his new soft tyres have given him so much advantage over the worn-out tyres on Lewis’ car that he would have caught and passed Lewis by the end of the lap. The speed at which Max overtook Lewis indicates he may have have caught him even with those 5 cars on the track, but Lewis is such a brilliant driver he might have been able to hold off Max from overtaking.

We can’t even re-run that last lap with those 5 cars between them as Lewis’ tyres were worn out and so Max’s tyres would have been an even bigger advantage.

Posted By: Farkeball on December 13th 2021 at 09:29:45

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