Planet-F1

Lewis was 'unsure' about McLaren's tactics

Sunday 20th July 2008

Lewis Hamilton admitted he had been expecting a procession to an easy win in the German Grand Prix before Timo Glock's crash brought out the Safety Car.

The Briton was comfortably leading the race when Glock crashed on lap 35, which resulted in a Safety Car being introduced.

While all the top teams pitted their the drivers, McLaren opted to keep Hamilton out.

And the Brit was forced to do things the hard way by overtaking Nelson Piquet with just seven laps to go, yet he still managed to win by 5.5 seconds.

"I would have much preferred an easy afternoon but it didn't work that way," he said.

"I got off to good start, the team opted for me to stay out and thought I could have pulled out a gap.

"I understood and just kept pushing - over the limit, pushing and pushing - but I couldn't find the gap.

"But I was able to pull it off."

Of the team decision to keep him out, Hamilton added: "I said 'are you sure about this', and they said fine. But we all have decisions and opinions and we'll learn from this one and move on.

"But we had the quickest car this weekend and we came out on top. The team has done a phenomenal job."

However, in order to win Hamilton had to pass both Ferrari's Felipe Massa and Nelson Piquet Jr in the final ten laps.

"With Felipe, I saw that I was a lot quicker than him at the time, so I just tried to keep up the pace," Hamilton said.

"I knew that I was on the early laps with my tyres so I knew I only had a small window to get past him before they grained and started sliding around, so I had to push and get as close to him as possible.

"But the great thing about this track is that you can follow other people, or so I found. So I was able to get quite close in the last two corners, follow him down towards Turn 2 and just slipstream him, but at the end of the straight he matched my speed, so it was a bit difficult to get past and I had to do it on the brakes. But he gave me plenty of room. I think it was quite a fair battle and it was good fun.

"I thought my work was done and they said 'you still have to get past Nelson'. I thought 'okay, I've just worked my backside off, but that's fine', and again he put up a really good battle but was very fair."