Sam Michael admires McLaren’s qualifying and pit stop performance in Hungarian GP – Formula 1 news
McLaren sporting director, Sam Michael has admired his team’s qualifying and pit stop performance in the 2012 Hungarian Grand Prix.
Lewis Hamilton of McLaren secured an amazing pole position in the Hungarian GP and claimed an impressive victory after dominating throughout the race.
Even though, Sam said that they were expecting a tough competition from Lotus in the previous race. Moreover, he said that they were well aware of the competitiveness of the drivers of the Enstone based team, Kimi Raikkonen and Romain Grosjean plus the competency
of their car.
Nevertheless, they performed incredibly well during the qualifying and executed tremendous pit-stop strategy which provided a competitive advantage to the British driver who won the race in the end.
Furthermore, he said that the overtaking was very difficult at Hungaroring Circuit which provided them an edge over their rivals as they started from the pole position.
In addition, he said that the tyre management of the Finnish driver was excellent during the race and Hamilton won by just a second which shows the efficiency of their pit stop.
“Lotus were definitely on us for whole race,” he said, “I think they really have good race car and we basically only beat them because of qualifying and fact that we beat them in pits. If they had qualified well and qualified in front of us then, because
it is difficult to overtake here, I think you would really struggle to beat them. They probably knew that we could beat them in pits, so it worked well. But definitely we thought they would be pretty hard work in the last stint, and Lewis drove very well to
keep Kimi off him.”
Presently, McLaren are standing at second place in the constructors’ championship with 193 points. Besides, they are just one point ahead of their main rival Lotus and are quite behind Red Bull Racing who are leading the standings with 246 points.
Over and above, they are surely one of the strongest candidates in this year’s championship battle and it will be thrilling to see how they show up after the summer smash.
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