Hamilton wanted to attack his teammate: "I just didn't think of that"

Lewis Hamilton claims that the first Safety Car during the Austrian Grand Prix lost his chances of winning. He took a gamble with his strategy to overtake Mercedes teammate Valtteri Bottas.

Strategy

"The fact is here at this track you know that in order to have an opportunity to pass the car in front of you always want to try and go for the opposite strategy", Hamilton said to Motorsport.com. "Now when you're when you're in a team like ours, the first car always gets the priority in the stop."

"And so if you both come out on the same tyres, you're pretty much stuffed at a track like this, particularly where it's very, very hard to overtake. It's something like eight-tenths of a second advantage you need on the car ahead to have an opportunity at fighting with them. So I knew that on the same tyre", explained Hamilton.

The first safety car

"It's something like eight-tenths of a second advantage you need on the car ahead to have an opportunity at fighting with them. But it didn't work out that way, and I don't think it was a big issue. I mean, there was so many other things that came into play", says Hamilton.

He says he didn't know what tyre he was going to get under the car when the safety car came out. "I really just hadn't thought of it, I assumed that they'll put us on the hard, being that we were quite short and there was still a long way to go", Hamilton ends.