Formula 1 champion, Lewis Hamilton had made a "tyre pressure" remark which was soon picked up by the media. The driver clarifies about the remark that was directed towards the Red Bull team.
The 70th Anniversary Grand Prix was indeed a tough challenge for the Mercedes team since both Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas lost pace due to the occurrence of tyre blisters which ultimately led to Max Verstappen's first win of the season.
During the race Hamilton stated that Verstappen's car seems to have lesser air pressure in the tyres.
Lewis Hamilton clarifies what he meant by commenting about the tyre pressure in the press conference post the race : “When we go out and we start the race we have minimal pressures and then during the race they increase."
Also See: Shovlin: Mercedes F1 Team Is "Excited" To Have A Challenge
He says that,“with more laps, they go on a steep rise and I assume that we just went on a much steeper rise and increase in pressures than… In general, to look after your tyres, you need to keep the temperatures down and hence the pressures, so that wasn’t really my thought processes when I was out there.
He added that “they must be able to keep their pressures lower than ours and that’s why ours were blistering and that was just a theory that I had."
Hamilton further clarified “I wasn’t saying that they have different settings to us, because we all have the same minimum but if you can keep your pressures lower then you can go further and make the tyres last longer, so I think that that’s probably – I’ll find out later but I’m sure that’s part of the issue that we had probably.”
Hamilton's statement has practicality, the Mercedes team however accepts this tyre issue as a challenge according to Chief race engineer Andrew Shovlin - “Right now we haven’t got the answers and I think the way that we approach problems are really interesting… and what we need to do is get excited about getting our heads together and fixing it because, actually, they are really interesting and good, fun problems, when you can get on top of them. [There's] an element of urgency here because we are flying out to Barcelona on Tuesday. "
