As the wheels went up on Mercedes' charter flight back to the U.K., the team's engineers were still trying to figure out how, exactly, they had lost the French Grand Prix. Taking off from the airstrip that runs parallel to the pit straight at Circuit Paul Ricard, the view from the jet window offered a complete picture of the scene of the defeat, yet the detail remained lost in the data. So close was the race that took place on ground level a few hours earlier, that a single second of "lost" time at Lewis Hamilton's pit stop had decided the outcome. Arguably Max Verstappen would have won regardless of the lost time given the performance he summoned from his Red Bull later in the...
Full Story »