Calling on Mercedes to be “brave” with an early switch to slick tyres, Jenson Button cannot fathom why Mercedes put George Russell on a set of hard tyres.
After all, his race engineer said the team would be “brave but not suicidal”.
Brave or ‘suicidal’? George Russell’s slick tyre call
Russell lined up P4 in a rain-affected British Grand Prix, but pitted early on the formation lap to swap his intermediate tyres for slicks.
In a game of tyre versus weather, as the race continued, he swapped back to inters and then onto slicks.
Calling for slicks tyres in a “brave” move from the team, Russell was told by Mercedes: “Brave, but not suicidal.”
And then the team put him on a set of hard tyres.
The hards required more time to heat up and reach optimum performance, with Russell finishing P10, earning a solitary point for himself and Mercedes.
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“At the last pit stop, I probably went too early,” Russell admitted. “I risked too much but I wasn’t expecting the hard tyre.
“Just a terrible day.
“Hurts me a lot, to be honest, to have a day like that here as my home Grand Prix. You play conservatively, we probably would have been, you know, P3, P4, P5 but that wasn’t what we were going for.”
Jenson Button says taking the chance on slick tyres was the right call, but using the hard Pirellis was not4
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” he told Sky F1. “They did jump to the slicks quite early, but also you don’t jump to slicks early and put a hard tyre on.
“You know, you’re the one taking a risk jumping to slicks early anyway, so I don’t know why you would put the hard tyre on.
“Obviously, they’re worried about the medium and the soft graining, but it’s either they grain a little bit and you lose a tiny bit of time, or you go spinning – many times.
“So I don’t understand.”
Russell called it a 50/50 decision.
“I think it was a 50/50 call,” Russell told Sky F1. “At the beginning there was 25 minutes of no rain, but we spent 15 minutes behind the virtual safety car.
“As soon as we got going at the end, we were five seconds a lap quicker than the inter runners. But then the rain came. In hindsight, of course, it’s easy to say we probably risked too much.”
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