It was a devilish dilemma for everyone during the code red situation: do we gamble on slicks before the restart, or are we going to try a few more laps on intermediates? Everyone eventually did the latter, only to find out at the end of the warm-up lap that opting for slicks would have been the better option on the now dried up Hungaroring.
The result: the entire field – except for Lewis Hamilton – ducked in to switch to dry weather tires after all. To the surprise of Tom Coronel. “I couldn’t understand why no one had gone on slicks. When I saw the tire warmers come off after the red flag situation, I thought ‘this can’t be true!?’ “Everyone was wrong. It was 3 pm in the afternoon, the asphalt was warm so it dries very quickly. When it stops raining, it dries super fast. And you know that intermediate tires only last four or five laps. I would have always gone for slicks, always,” said the analyst in the latest podcast of RacingNews365.
Red Bull and Max Verstappen also took it for sure and continued to drive on inters. According to Coronel, he shouldn’t have done that. “Max was in P13, so I thought: ‘You have to do exactly the opposite of what your competitor does, otherwise you won’t get there anymore’. When I saw that Max was also on intermediates, I got a pain in my stomach .”
Podcast colleague Ruud Dimmers also did not understand that Red Bull had not switched to slicks for the restart. “Then it was actually over for the second time. Verstappen already had a crooked shopping cart, because his car was of course heavily battered. The bargeboard was half off, a complete bite had been taken from the floor, the rear bodywork was broken, that whole thing didn’t run at all.”
“There were a lot of people who had nothing to lose,” he continues. “If you are Ocon and you are second, I understand that you make that choice. Then you go for safe. But there were also guys who had nothing to lose. Max had nothing to lose, Hamilton still had something in theory to lose.”
What remained was the hangover from the scenario ‘what if…?’ According to Coronel, it would have been a lot rosier for Verstappen and Red Bull. “What I was disappointed with is that everyone came in and no one had taken the risk. I thought that was a shame, because then Max would have been in the lead for half a lap and we would have been in a completely different situation.”
What if he had taken the gamble to switch to slicks in advance? “Then he would have won it, then he would have really won. So this hurts.”
Listen to the full RacingNews365 podcast below:
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