The conclusion to the Bahrain Grand Prix was so close that Mercedes’ predictive tools couldn’t determine the winner and was switching between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen.
Mercedes had won track position for Hamilton with an early pair of pitstops but that meant poleman Verstappen was on the attack in the final stint with fresher tyres, and only got close enough to attack with three laps remaining.
The epic finale included an illegal off-track overtake from Verstappen, forcing him to immediately relinquish the lead to Hamilton, who held on to win by less than a second.
Mercedes technical director James Allison has described the closing laps of the grand prix as “one of the most thrilling, nail-biting, sort of, chest-bursting experiences that I have ever had at a race track”.
He revealed it was such a tight battle that Mercedes’ various predictive tools could not decide which of Hamilton or Verstappen would win and was changing the expected victor “every two or three seconds”.
“We have all sorts of tools at the track that make predictions for us, that show us how the tyres are wearing, what the likelihood is of holding a place, not holding a place and we have the timing screens like everyone else and we have the television like everyone else,” said Allison in Mercedes’ post-race review.
“But all those tools were of no help, they were making a prediction that was changing with about every two or three seconds.
“It was saying Lewis was going to win, then it would change its mind and say that Max was going to win.
“But honestly you didn’t need the software to know how tight it was and all of us were holding our breath, crossing our fingers, crossing our toes and just hoping with everything we had that Lewis would be able to hang on to the end.
“That he did so in such style, that he did so with such inch perfect positioning of his car at Turn 4 when Max had that one go at him, that he did so with that degree of class just added to the thrill of it all.
“When he finally crossed the line there was an outbreak of mass hysteria in our garage with the utter, utter delight of it.
“Last year, we managed to win lots of races with a very strong set of performances but there will be very few races as memorable as the one that we enjoyed yesterday in Bahrain.”
The win meant Hamilton scored his first victory in a season opener since 2015 and gave the seven-time world champion and his team an early advantage in what is expected to be a season-long fight against Red Bull.
Mercedes had to overcome a pace deficit to score that victory and its strategic play to gain track position was also meant to include the second car of Valtteri Bottas getting ahead of Verstappen as well.
Bottas was frustrated to not be allowed to extend his second stint but Mercedes called him in to try to undercut Verstappen with both cars.
That would have given Bottas the chance to hold onto second, or at least given Mercedes another car between Verstappen and Hamilton in its bid to win.
Unfortunately for Bottas his race was undermined by a slow pitstop that left him a distant third at the finish.
“Sadly one of the gun men went onto the wheel, started to disengage the nut, loosened the nut but then started to withdraw the wheel gun just a little bit too soon before the nut had spun off its thread,” Allison explained.
“Because it was still offering some resistance at that point, as he withdrew the wheel gun, the socket on the wheel gun started to disengage from the nut and then started to spin round.
“We call it machining the nut because it starts to chip away at the edges of the nut and destroy the nut, a bit like when you are using a screwdriver and you don’t have it lined up properly, and you start to sort of damage the screwdriver slot.
“So, as he pulled away, the gun machined away at the nut and it didn’t actually come off its mountings.
“He went back in to deal with it but the gun is designed to recognise when it has done a ‘gunning off’ action and it automatically shuttles the gun so that it is then in ‘doing up’ mode.
“So when he went back on to finish the job of taking the wheel nut off, the gun is now in ‘doing up’ mode and instead of undoing the nut, it is doing it up again.
“The subsequent sort of follow-on mess of that is what causes something which is normally a beautiful two-second pit stop to then collapse into something that haemorrhages lap time and seconds in the pit lane.
“But all of it was caused by that initial misplacing of the wheel gun, machining the nut as the wheel gun came off.”
