Surely the only people not complaining about the controversial two-stop rule in Monaco are the Racing Bulls who turned it to their advantage.
“A brilliant job by our strategists,” RB’s chief executive, Peter Bayer told ServusTV at race end. “We’ve had our share of frustrations with Laurent over strategy,” he added, referring to team boss Laurent Mekies, “but today they really pulled off a stroke of genius. The bit of risk we took definitely paid off.”
The stroke of genius was to use Liam Lawson to set a pace which would allow teammate Isack Hadjar to build enough of a gap to be able to pit and rejoin the race in clear air, which he did twice.
The tactic allowed Hadjar to finish fifth, and while totally frustrating the best efforts of the Williams and Mercedes drivers, saw Lawson score his first points of the year also.
“Theoretically there was even more possible,” said Bayer. “The risk was definitely high, but no risk, no fun, as they say. The decision was to let Lewis go so we could essentially take control with both our cars.
“Carlos might have taken that position from us otherwise, but since he was clearly pushing hard, we said ‘okay, that gives us the window’. We had to use the soft tyres, so we tried to keep that stint as short as possible because they simply wouldn’t deliver performance over a long period.
“Yeah, perfectly executed by the guys… we’re very, very happy that the risk paid off.”
“Honestly yesterday I had a lot of fun, a lot more fun than today,” said Hadjar, “but still the race was perfectly executed.
“Liam helped me massively,” he added, “it was great team work and also he helped me, but he also got points so I’m really happy for him.”
“I’m very, very happy for everyone,” said Lawson. “It was a good race, very straightforward from our side. I’m very happy.
“It’s not often you have a plan and you execute it perfectly,” he admitted. “We were able to do that today. For our fight in the midfield, it’s very important. From my side, it’s great to get some points. We should have started higher from yesterday, but that’s on me.”
Asked about maintaining a pace that frustrated his rivals whilst allowing his teammate to pull ahead, the New Zealander said: “It’s actually really a lot more difficult than I expected from a concentration point of view but it’s something that from a team side made sense.”
“Nothing came easily in this weekend,” insisted Mekies. “If you recall, we were not exactly topping the practice session times. We took it step-by-step, the guys have been doing a huge amount of laps, that was our only priority in FP1 and FP2.
“You have seen some kisses with the wall in free practice,” he added. “So nothing came easily but slowly everything has been put together. The team has been doing an amazing job to support the talent of Isack and Liam.”
Check out our Sunday gallery from Monaco here.
