AMS: Albon was sacrificed for Verstappen in Spain
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- GPblog.com
During his first stint in the Spanish Grand Prix Max Verstappen told his team that he wanted to go in for new tyres. Red Bull Racing however had other plans and let the 22 year old Dutchman stay on the track. According to Auto, Motor und Sport the Austrian race team had two good reasons for this.
In lap 18 Verstappen was already begging for a tyre change, but only three laps later Red Bull answered that call. Why did the team of Christian Horner and Helmut Marko wait so long?
Gap to Racing Point
First of all Verstappen had to pull a bigger gap to both Racing Points. Had Verstappen stopped earlier than in lap 21, he would have ended up on the asphalt behind Lance Stroll and Sergio Perez. The Limburger himself was of the opinion that he could have overtaken the pink cars easily with fresher tyres, but Red Bull obviously didn't want to take the gamble.
The second reason is that the Milton Keynes based race team wanted to see how Alexander Albon would do on the hard tire. According to the German medium, the British Thai was sacrificed. Despite a fast pit stop the team mate of Verstappen fell far back and ended up in traffic.
Experiment failed
Because of this the Red Bull engineers couldn't see how well the white compound performed in Barcelona and if it was possible to put Verstappen on a one-stop shop. Red Bull didn't take the risk because they didn't want to give the second place back to Valtteri Bottas.
After the first pit stop it was already clear for Max and Red Bull that a victory was out of the question. Verstappen drove a slower car and drove on exactly the same strategy as Lewis Hamilton. From then on everything was done to keep Bottas on P3.