Martin Brundle stood with George Russell and Toto Wolff as he gave his verdict on a milestone victory for Lewis Hamilton at the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix. And the Sky Sports favourite also denounced the “mess” created by the Formula 1 stewards and what was by far their most controversial call of the weekend.
Sunday saw Hamilton shine in the Barcelona sun as he overcame an underwhelming first stint on soft tyres to make a three-stop strategy work perfectly. He was the fastest man on track for much of the Grand Prix despite being behind leader George Russell but, after the Mercedes man lost time while battling, with team-mate Kimi Antonelli, the opportunity arose for Hamilton to make his move.
Fernando Alonso pulled over at the side of the track and the Virtual Safety Car was deployed, just after Russell and Antonelli had pitted to leave Hamilton out in front. The Ferrari star accepted the cheap change of tyres and emerged from the pit lane ahead of the two Mercedes cars. And, from there, he had the pace to leave them in his wake as he romped to a first win in red.
Speaking afterwards, Russell noted that the gap between them was 19.5 seconds at the end and felt Hamilton would have beaten him even without the VSC – a claim backed up by his boss Toto Wolff. And Brundle is also on that same wavelength.
He wrote in his Sky Sports column: “Would he have won regardless of saving 10 seconds on that third and final stop? It’s hard to be certain because he would have needed to overtake [Lando] Norris and the two Mercedes ordinarily, but my feeling is that he would have won anyway, such was his pace and tyre advantage in the closing stages.”
Much of the weekend, though, was overshadowed by the stewards’ decision to uphold Alpine’s Right of Review against the result of the previous Sunday’s race in Monaco. They found that Pierre Gasly should not have been penalised for pit lane speeding and so expunged his penalties, restoring him to third place from seventh. That angered a lot of other teams as other drivers had also been penalised for the same thing, but none of them had submitted a Right of Review in time like Alpine did.
But the end result is that McLaren and Red Bull are considering appeals against the outcome while Mercedes have spoken to their lawyers. For Brundle, it was “a very complicated and uncomfortable decision” and he feels this is not the last we have heard of the matter.
He said: “It’s all a mess with no easy solution. It turns out one of the timing loops in the Monaco pit lane was 77cm shorter than calibrated hence lots of 60.1kph recordings when the limit was 60kph. It had been a topic of correspondence since first practices, and some teams adjusted their limiters. There was clearly something amiss with so many identical offences, and it’s surprising that the stewards hadn’t been made aware. Lessons will be learned no doubt and the story will presumably run a while.”