Lewis Hamilton has explained a radio call in which he appeared to question if Red Bull were running low tyre pressures during Sunday’s race at Silverstone.
Following the punctures seen late on in the British Grand Prix, Pirelli announces an increase in the minimum PSI required in both the front and rear tyres for the second GP in the UK last weekend.
Describing them post-race as “balloons”, the six-time world champion believes the high pressures were responsible for the extreme blistering that hurt Mercedes and allowed the Red Bull driver to take the win.
But when Verstappen was closing in during the first stint, Hamilton made the suggestive comment to his team that “he [Max] must have less pressure in his tyres or something”.
“When we go out and we start the race we have minimal pressures and then during the race they increase,” Lewis said, denying it was an accusation of Red Bull running below the required limit.
“With more laps, they go on a steep rise and I assume that we just went on a much steeper rise and increase in pressures than Max.
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“In general, to look after your tyres, you need to keep the temperatures down and hence the pressures, so that wasn’t really my thought processes when I was out there.
“They must be able to keep their pressures lower than ours and that’s why ours were blistering and that was just a theory that I had.
“I wasn’t saying that they have different settings to us because we all have the same minimum,” Hamilton insisted.
“But if you can keep your pressures lower then you can go further and make the tyres last longer, so I think that that’s probably it.
“I’ll find out later but I’m sure that’s part of the issue that we had probably.”
A later pit-stop allowed Hamilton to charge back through the field to second in the closing laps.
