How Red Bull's Overthinking Robbed Ricciardo of the Monaco Grand Prix

The Monaco GP proved to be a thrilling contest, and unlike in Barcelona we didn't have to lose the two Mercedes drivers to give someone else a shot at winning.

Daniel Ricciardo was on superb form all weekend, and without that embarrassing mix-up in the Red Bull garage, he would surely have won the race.

But that shouldn't detract from an equally stellar performance from Lewis Hamilton, who was able to turn things around after losing a lot of time stuck behind teammate Nico Rosberg in the early laps.

It was the ideal way for him to reach his landmark 44th win.

This was a fantastic F1 race by any standards, one where tyres and strategy played a crucial role throughout.

Indeed, at one point all five of Pirelli's available tyres – wet, intermediate, soft, supersoft and the new ultrasoft – were actually briefly out on track at the same time - a sign of what an unusual afternoon this was.

A dry race would have presented interesting strategic variation given that Ricciardo would have started from pole on supersofts, while those behind were committed to ultrasofts.

Instead, we had the frustration of a start behind the safety car, with everyone on full wets.

Seven laps passed before Charlie Whiting finally released the field, and that – followed by some virtual safety car running after Jolyon Palmer's crash – meant that drivers struggled with temperatures.

And no one struggled more than Rosberg. The German soon lost touch with Ricciardo, who took full advantage of a clear track to disappear into the distance.

Rosberg found himself struggling with low brake temperatures – possibly a result of excessive blanking for the wet conditions – which in turn helped to ensure that he was out of the optimum window on tyre temperatures and pressures.

And then he was into that cycle of losing confidence, being unable to push to the limit, and thus unable to get those temperatures back up.

Meanwhile, Hamilton found himself stuck behind his teammate, and growing increasingly frustrated.

Hamilton made his thoughts clear to the team, but at no stage did he suggest that he should be allowed past.

"Very, very rare that I've ever asked to be let by. I was behind Nico. My engineers spoke to me and I replied, I said, 'I'm much quicker, but it's just so hard to pass.' I don't know if anything happened from that."

Instead, Mercedes invoked a simple agreement that applies in such circumstances. If it makes a difference to the team result – and in this case there was a clear danger of losing out to Red Bull – then the driver has to move over.

"It was pretty simple because it is a rule that we have had for many, many years now," said Rosberg. "And it was pretty obvious at the time that I am not going to be able to fight for the win at that pace, and so it is clearly that you need to give Lewis the chance to do it.

"They gave me a warning to try to up the pace, and I wasn't able to do it, and then the next step is to let Lewis by – and the final result made it worthwhile in that sense for the team.

"For sure it is proof that it was the right thing to do at the time because Lewis would not have won otherwise. So that got the team the win in Monaco and therefore fully understandable and simple – very painful, but that is clear, but easy to decide to do that."

Paddy Lowe confirmed that Hamilton didn't specifically request help: "Not at all, he didn't ask for it. He didn't even say 'he's holding me up' or anything like that."

Hamilton moved into second place at the start of lap 16, and at the end of it he was 13.4 seconds behind Ricciardo.

The Australian was flying, and even without Rosberg and his spray in front, Hamilton found it hard to make much progress. The gap came down in tiny increments, and he gained only 1.2 seconds over the next six laps.

By then the two leaders and Pascal Wehrlein were the only drivers not to have pitted for intermediates, and at the end of lap 23 Ricciardo left Hamilton out front on his own when he came in.

We might have expected Hamilton to stay out for one or two more laps, but instead he kept pounding around and extracting decent laptimes from his now ageing wets, which, as they wore down, seemed to be performing at least as well as everyone else's intermediates.

This was an unusual situation, one that perhaps even surprised his team. "It was very strange," Lowe admitted.

It created the opportunity for Hamilton and the team to pull off the bold strategy of staying out as the track dried and then making the jump straight from wets to slicks without using inters. It was the only way to gain a tactical advantage over Ricciardo.

Hamilton would do one less pitstop than the Aussie, and when he did it, he would still at worst come out in second, ahead of Rosberg.

"Lewis being able to let loose from Nico, he was able to pull a buffer," said Lowe. "There was no way he was going to catch Ricciardo, they were quite a similar pace.

"But at some point we realised we had a buffer to work with, and there was no risk to staying out. He was virtually doing the same times as Nico.

"It wasn't even a gamble to just sit there and see what happened. Actually, after a while, it stabilised where on the extreme wet he was just as quick as Nico on the inter behind. We could just wait until the circuit was right."

The strategy choice came from the pitwall, so as Lowe confirmed it was not a question of Hamilton suggesting that he could pull it off: "He may have been thinking it himself in parallel.

"There's not a lot of communication. Certainly we came up with a plan without his prompting. All he was saying was 'the tyre I'm on is fine, I don't need to stop'."

So Hamilton kept pounding round, and Ricciardo found himself stuck behind on what should have been the quicker tyre, but unable to fully exploit it.

The rush to slicks was started by Marcus Ericsson on lap 29, with the Swede soon followed by the likes of Button, Magnussen, Bottas and Grosjean.

It was then that we briefly had the possibly never to be repeated scenario of drivers running wets, intermediates and all three slicks on the same track at the same time.

Of course, Hamilton had more to lose or gain than the others, and he had to get his timing right. He came in lap 31, having been just 0.7 seconds ahead as they crossed the line on the previous lap. It was now all about his out-lap, Ricciardo's in-lap, and any precious time wasted in the pits.

Lewis found that transition from well-worn wet to new slick more of a handful than he had perhaps expected, and he had a scrappy out lap that saw him thump the Swimming Pool kerbs.

Meanwhile, Ricciardo took full advantage of the clean air and put in a superbly fast in-lap, and the delta between the two should have guaranteed that he came out of the pits well in front.

Alas he arrived at the Red Bull garage on lap 32 to find no one home, amid a mad scramble to locate his supersoft tyres.

The stop stretched out to an agonising 13.6 seconds, and even then, when he finally emerged from the pitlane, he only just lost out to Lewis, indicating just how much time the Mercedes driver had lost on his tentative first lap on slicks.

"Even despite that delay they came out alongside each other," said Horner. "Showing how quick Daniel's in-lap had been and how slow Lewis' out-lap had been. So it was gutting for the whole team to lose a victory like that."

"Honestly at the time I didn't know he had a problem in the pitstop," said Hamilton. "I pitted the lap before, but it was a horrible out-lap, it was very difficult to know where the grip was, it was one corner where the car felt good, and the others were very, very tricky.

"Honestly I didn't know if he would be faster, or if I was the same time or much, much slower."

Having been nose-to-tail before the stops the pair were back to the same situation, and again they were on different tyres. Whereas before it was Hamilton on wets and Ricciardo on inters, now they were on ultrasofts and supersofts, and that set up a fascinating second part of the race.

How would they fare having to run 48 and 47 laps respectively to the flag? And would Hamilton even be able to make it without another stop?

Lowe insisted that ultrasofts were the logical choice: "If you figure you can get to the end you're going to take the softest tyre you can with those wet conditions. You know that it's not going to like normal running in the dry, because it's going to take a lot of laps for the circuit to fully dry up,"

At Red Bull, meanwhile, they had time to digest what Hamilton had taken before making a decision on what to give Ricciardo.

From its running on Thursday, Red Bull thought that ultrasofts would not work, and after initially opting for softs there was a late change to the supersofts, which of course led to the confusion in the garage.

"We felt that once we saw Mercedes fit the ultrasoft, the best way to counter that in case Lewis had had a ballistic out-lap was to go on to the supersoft," said Horner.

The two tyres seemed evenly matched for most of the stint, although at times the softs used by the likes of Sergio Perez and Sebastian Vettel looked better than either – and that must have been painful for Red Bull, given that, had they stuck with the initial choice of softs for Ricciardo, the pitstop disaster would not have happened.

Hamilton did a superb job to keep Ricciardo behind and keep some life in his tyres, and in the closing laps, it was the Red Bull that seemed to be struggling for pace as a gap began to open.

"As it turned out, I think, Ricciardo's tyres went off first," said Lowe. "They seemed to have some graining on the front."

In the closing laps Hamilton began to lose temperature in his old ultrasofts, and he could have found himself under threat. Instead he addressed the temperature issue himself – by going faster.

"Probably with about seven laps to go, I started applying more pressure, because the tyres were getting worse," he explained. "So I had to push more to keep the temperature in the tyres, particularly in the last five laps.

"And then the gap was growing between me and Daniel, so I think he had pushed in certain areas, I could see he pushed in certain places. And I was thinking - whilst he has the harder tyre, I don't think it's going to last."

Right at the end, light drizzle made life difficult for everyone. Rosberg, also on well-used ultrasofts, struggled to the extent that he lost sixth place to Nico Hulkenberg on the last lap.

Hamilton, in contrast, continued to extend his lead right to the flag.

"I said 'please God hold off for another lap or so', I literally said that in the car. Another couple of laps… And it did start to spit, and it was starting to get slippery.

"But I started to push more in order to generate more heat in the tyres, and therefore I was just OK. Literally as I came across the line it started to come down from the heavens."

Ricciardo was unlucky, but this was a superb drive by Hamilton, who showed his class with his pace on those old wets on a drying track, and on his old ultrasofts at the end of his long second stint.

"That was a very unique race," said Hamilton. "And being as it's a wet race, it's a race where you just have to feel it.

"It is all about feeling with these tyres, with the brakes, with the temperatures, knowing the lines, knowing where the limit is, stepping over it now and then but making sure you always come correct. That's what really made the race today. I was on the limit the whole way."

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