Mercedes admits: 'Then Verstappen would have disappeared forever'

Against all expectations, Austin turned out to be Red Bull territory. This also came as a surprise to Mercedes, and so the team will investigate the reason for the disappointing performance. Lewis Hamilton's chances of winning diminished considerably after the undercut by Max Verstappen.

According to Mercedes, Hamilton only had a chance because of his good start. "If Lewis had gone into the first corner in second place, Max would have disappeared forever," the team's engineers state in conversation with Auto, Motor und Sport. According to them, the Red Bull was clearly the faster car on the medium tyres, which was evident from the early stages of the race in which Verstappen was on Hamilton's tail for a long time.

Undercut didn't help Hamilton either

In the Mercedes, the rear medium compound tyres wore out very quickly. The engineers feared that the same picture would repeat itself with the hard tyres, but that turned out to be a misconception. On the hard tyres, the Mercedes was at least as fast as the Red Bull. Had they known that in advance, Hamilton would probably have been called into the pits somewhere between the 8th and 10th laps to anticipate Verstappen's undercut.

Could Mercedes have won it then by performing an undercut on Verstappen? The engineers think not. "Lewis would have fallen behind Ricciardo and would have had to attack immediately to make the undercut possible," they explain. "Probably it would not have worked at all. Max would have been able to drive much faster with the medium tires and thus fend off the undercut," they conclude.