I mean, Toto came on the radio on the cooldown lap and basically said the hard tyres were the wrong call, no? So I don't think Lewis was saying anything we didn't already know (about the strategy). I also think it's pretty well understood that the Red Bull is just a faster car, though I think Merc thought with thin air this was a shot for them to be very close.
The Peter Windsor
recap was interesting, he said Merc was surprised that RB was able to make soft/med work as a 1-stop, Merc assumed that going med/hard as a 1-stop would give them a decent shot at a race win over a soft/med/med (or soft/med/soft, dunno if that was available) 2-stop strategy and Max/Checo were able to stretch the softs a ton more than expected. Once Red Bull was able to make a 1-stop work, Merc had few options, they could have tried med/soft (a la Danny Ric) which probably was the right call in retrospect, or taken the cheap pitstop under VSC to go med/hard/soft, which seemed to be what George wanted. But I think their strategy team was pretty locked into their plan and couldn't see a way (or a reason?) to change it. The deg advantage of the hard ended up being minimal compared to the mediums on the Red Bull, and that was really their only hope.
Mercedes still absolutely destroyed Ferrari. All those shots of Charles (and Carlos) sliding over that kerb were showing how skittish their car was, going all the way back to FP1 I think.
I just saw a video that said that the thin air made it harder to cool down cars and Ferrari deliberately chose a slower setup in order to increase reliability. I believe it because I saw Sainz say after the race that the performance wasn't there but the good news is they knew why.
Widsor also interestingly said in an earlier video that Mercedes benefited from the thin air because it ameliorated all the problems they had with their chassis sticking too close to the ground and creating purpoising.
IMO, Mercedes also was lucky to not get the same backlash as Ferrari in Hungary even though they made a very similar mistake, because they were enjoying lower expectations they were exceeding and because they have the rep of a competent team that makes proper strategy calls -which to be fair isn't an unfounded rep either.
All in all, it was a boring race and my interest in the sport is starting to wane again. The big issue is that it's tough for the sport to be exciting for a multitudue of reasons. In random order:
1. To a great extent victory or defeat is determined at the factories and wind tunnels away from the track.
2. We like to celebrate the drivers, but the truth of the matter is that the speed of the car determines success.
3. The techical details that determine success and failure are obscure to the casual fan. Like, last year a big part of performance derived from the sticky bits on the upper side of the floor board; those sticky bits had random shapes that were probably worked out on the wind tunnel. This year, a big part of success depends on the underside of the car, but most of us haven't seen it and if we had, we couldn't be able to tell why one is working better than the other.
4. The watchability of a sport depends to a large extent to unpredictability and a certain back and forth. In F1, all things being equal, the fastest car will start first and only go on to increase their time margin from the car behind. Formula 1 to her credit is trying to fight this by introducing the cost cap, which will probably help over the next few years. It's also trying to inject variance to racing. That partly happens from using different track layouts that favor one or the other team from one weekend to the next -though this doesn't make the racing more exciting necessarily- but also by using things such as mandatory pit stops in order to use at least two different sets of tires. The different sets of tires is an effort to inject variance on its own. However, these strategies also have limits. In the old days, pitstops introduced far more variance than today. When I was watching F1 as a kid, pitstops lasted 10 seconds and they were very often botched. It was even worse before my time during the 50s and the 60s when pitstops took a minute to complete. As time goes by however, teams gradually solve these problems and today's pitstops are probably as efficient as they can possibly be. Moreover, the introduction of different sets of tires has led to some perverse incentives, as drivers have realized that it makes less sense to go balls to the wall trying to go as fast as possible and instead focusing on so-called tire management - which is a euphemism for going slower in order to conserve tire life. A big reason Verstappen won yesterday was that his tire management was great and he exceeded the expectations of the default strategy.
I really don't know how you can sole those issues. Like I said, the cost cap will help. But let's also not forget that this isn't just a pure sport, it's a vehicle for automotive development and a big part of the reason many car manufacturers enter the sport; this is why for example we aren't seeing the best/fastest racing cars that can be produced today, but we are focusing on using alternative fuels and batteries.
5. Personally, I would watch a reality show that followed each team at the factory throughout the season as they tried to eke more performance. I would also welcome the introduction of a parallel driver's championship in which instead of having sprint races, we have an extra race during the weekend in which all the drivers compete using the same chassis and engine. I can already hear the objection that this isn't F1, F1 isn't supposed to be like the Indycar series and it's not a baseless criticism. I would also be concerned that if you had two championships running in parallel each weekend, you would cannibalizing or weakening the one form of racing that garnered more interest.
But even so, it maybe worth trying so we can finally get a more honest assessment of each driver's ability. I am obviously not holding my breath that this is going to be happening soon.