Would Hamilton's attempted one-stop have worked at the Dutch GP?

A late virtual safety car for debris had rather stalled out Lewis Hamilton's late-race push for a Dutch Grand Prix podium finish, as his assault against a third-placed George Russell - who had been on well-worn hard tyres - was put on pause for a lap.

Hamilton's momentum had suddenly stopped, and there wasn't enough time to claim a similar foothold and pass his former team-mate for third. Of course, Hamilton's cause hadn't been helped by a bit of a hold-up from Charles Leclerc earlier in the race, who had caught Russell but hadn't been able to make any headway before the Mercedes driver stopped on lap 40.

When Leclerc stopped three laps later, Hamilton was eventually released and (unbeknown to him) began an ambitious journey towards a one-stop strategy. Mercedes theorised that the seven-time champion was going to the end, and the gusto with which he defended his temporary lead against Kimi Antonelli and Lando Norris suggested that he was fighting to hang onto every possible position.

Indeed, Ferrari's Formula 1 boss Fred Vasseur confirmed as such, and that the lack of communication was to avoid tipping off the other teams in the event that his radio traffic was broadcast. 

Eventually, a VSC for Esteban Ocon's stop on-track (several laps prior to the late debris caution) provided Ferrari a window with which to stop Hamilton and give him a set of soft tyres. This facilitated the Russell battle but, as seen in the dying stages of the grand prix, Hamilton ran out of time to make the move.

Had the VSC not occurred, could Hamilton have made the one-stop work? 

Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes, Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari, Lando Norris, McLaren

Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images

We need to make a few assumptions here to cover off the VSC periods. For Hamilton, we're going to do quite a lot of extrapolation, but it should be grounded in sense. Taking the average of his times from lap 39 to 53 to represent pace in somewhat clean air, we get a 1m16.431s baseline time which we'll pencil in for his lap 55 instead of the pit-in lap he actually completed. Lap 54 is as-is, a 1m18.011s given that he lost time fighting with Antonelli and Norris, but we won't include that in the average.

We won't introduce any decay to this for the sake of simplicity, so let's assume each of Hamilton's laps from this point is a 1m16.431s.

For Russell, we can simply take his real-world laps and then cover off the VSC periods with the average of the two 'surrounding laps' - so, for laps 55-57, we'll take his lap 54 (a 1m15.654s) and lap 58 (a 1m15.581s) and average them, giving us a 1m15.618s. We'll do the same to produce his lap 70 time from laps 69 and 71, giving us a 1m16.324s.

We can add our laps together, add Hamilton's starting delta to Russell as of the end of lap 38, which is 3.142s, and then we have two lap 39-72 times.

Here is the list of estimated lap times for this portion of the race.

If this was to play out as such, Russell would have gone 4.359s quicker across the stint overall, despite the added time for his pit stop. And, since he's capable of producing lap times a second quicker than Hamilton given the tyre disparity, you could expect Russell to mount the pass.

By calculating the running difference on race times, Russell gets within overtake range at the end of lap 60 - and then potentially moves ahead by lap 61 at the earliest. Even if Hamilton's tyre wear loss was in equilibrium with the gain from fuel load, Russell would be expected to reclaim third - and Hamilton's "guinea pig" experiment would be in vain.

To be assured of remaining ahead, Hamilton would need the yield from reduced fuel loads to be greater than the loss of tyre wear, to the tune of around 0.07s per lap - which is unrealistic, given that Russell on newer tyres was not setting the low-1m15s at the end of the race that Hamilton would need to do.

In reality, some decay would be expected from tyres that old, further demonstrating that the one-stop was optimistic at best.

Therefore, getting the VSC stop was a significant boost to Hamilton's chances; while it didn't quite work out, being on the soft compound for the end of the race at least presented an opportunity to cut down a near-seven second gap in the final phase of the grand prix.