“You can’t imagine the pressure on these guys. They are mechanics who don’t
get paid extra for doing it. They put themselves in the firing line.
Naturally I am very protective of them.
“It is the same guy [as in China] and we changed him for the last stop of the
race because he took it very badly.
“There is a lot of pressure with three-second stops these day and everyone
knows that the last gun off is the one that dictates the pace of that
change. So if it hasn’t been going well for you it is enormously stressful.”
Asked what the team could do to rectify these errors, Whitmarsh said they
would be looking at their whole approach. “We will review lots of things,”
he said. “We have got to look at the equipment, the process and the
approach. It is not a criticism of him as an individual.”
Hamilton
revealed prior to the race in China that he was confident McLaren’s pit stop
errors were a thing of the past after analysing videos with his mechanics.
The 2008 world champion said he had noticed ways he could improve his
positioning as he entered the pit box to make life easier for his mechanics.
But he conceded yesterday there was little more he could do. “Since the last
race in China my positioning has been much better,” he said.
“That’s generally fixed now. I think I did a better job on all my three stops
today. “Unfortunately the pit stops were just not quick enough. It is the
team’s job to sort that out and that is what they will do.”
Hamilton added that with the car not performing as it has in recent races, he
was unlikely to have done better than fourth or fifth. His one major
incident involved an overtaking manoeuvre on Mercedes’ Nico Rosberg which
saw the German force Hamilton off the track.
Hamilton joked that he mistook Rosberg, who repeated the trick on Ferrari’s
Fernando Alonso but was not punished on either occasion, for his famously
aggressive team mate.
“I thought it was Michael Schumacher for one second!” he said. “I felt like I
was forced off the track; it was really dusty, the car started bottoming and
there were marbles. I had to lift a little bit to make sure I didn’t lose
control of the car.”
Hamilton’s team mate Jenson Button suffered an equally frustrating race. The
2009 world champion was battling with Force India’s Paul di Resta for fifth
place when he suffered a puncture with three laps to go and dropped out of
the points, before retiring on the penultimate lap with a broken exhaust.
“Fifth place was easy pickings,” he said. “It is still not great but we would
have still been leading the championship, but we have thrown away 10 points,
which is quite a lot.
“We have got to limit our mistakes. We have had too many and we have just got
to improve. We are quick but we have to make our consistency better.”