What the teams said – Race day of the 2024 Dutch Grand Prix from Zandvoort

Mercedes

Hamilton opted for a soft start and used that compound to climb back into the top 10 from his P14 grid position. He managed to make them last long enough to make up for any time lost by an early pit stop, and was then extremely quick on the hard tyres. Russell, meanwhile, had been running third in the early stages but was being undercut by Leclerc. He couldn’t hold off Piastri and was on the verge of losing out to Sainz when the team brought him in for a second stop, losing him a place to Perez. In the end he didn’t get that place back, so the second stop cost him, as he finished with his teammate right behind him despite having started 10 places ahead of him.

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Lewis Hamilton, 8th

“We knew it was all about damage limitation today. We managed to work our way back into the points, but ultimately we didn’t have the pace to fight much more today. If we had qualified better yesterday, it might have been a bit different. I did enjoy passing a few cars and using the soft tyre in that opening stint. It felt good to move forward, but I’m a bit disappointed because if we had had a better Saturday, the fight would have been for more points.

“Strategically we wanted to run the one-stop to the end. However, I had a lock-up on the hard tyre and that meant we switched to the two-stop. It was a shame to lose the fastest lap point at the end, but I should have made a quicker effort earlier.”

George Russel, 7th

“Today’s race was a strange one. We didn’t have the speed and that was the case on all three tyre compounds. I felt I was sliding quite a bit, suffering from high degradation and slowly going backwards. We will have to understand why that was, because we were relatively quick on Saturday. Performance varies from circuit to circuit, but we have been at the front for the last six races, so I am convinced that this is an outlier.

“We will immediately start working to understand why we were slower than our competitors today. We have another race in Monza next weekend and we aim to do a much better performance there.”

Toto Wolff, Head of Mercedes-Benz Motorsport

“We had a bad race today. It was quite a contrast to the previous Grand Prix in Spa, where we set the pace and finished first and second on track. We clearly made some wrong decisions in terms of how we drove the car here. We will evaluate that quickly so we can avoid a race like this. It is painful. Sometimes it is good to be bruised to take a step forward.

“With George we switched to a two-stop strategy because he ran out of tyres in his second stint. Part of that higher degradation was probably due to some set-up decisions we made. We’ll have to do a full analysis to understand how much of that was due to those or other factors. With Lewis we had planned a two-stop race for him, although we reviewed the one-stop halfway through. However, he had a lock-up on the hard tyre and, with no risk behind him, we switched him to a two-stop strategy. However, his pace was good throughout and that gives us encouragement. There’s clearly a lot we can learn from this weekend and hopefully we can bounce back next weekend in Monza.”

Andrew Shovlin, Director of Trackside Engineering

“Overall it was a bad weekend. We will go through the data to understand why we were not up to speed in both qualifying and the race. Today we lacked the speed to fight for much more than we achieved. We did not generate good grip and therefore slid around on the tyre. That led to a higher degradation than our competitors and forced us to a two-stop race. We were on the back foot today, but we will work hard to make sure that is not the case next weekend in Monza.”