Lewis Hamilton believes he should have been allowed to adopt an alternative strategy at the Brazilian Grand Prix to utilise the pace advantage he felt he held over Mercedes team-mate and race winner Nico Rosberg.
Rosberg beat Hamilton by over seven seconds at Interlagos, but earlier in the race the gap was as small as 0.4s as Hamilton hounded his team-mate following their first pit stops. Mercedes put the two on near identical three-stop strategies, with Rosberg pitting a lap earlier each time in accordance with Mercedes in-house policy that the leader always gets to gain any advantage from switching to fresh tyres first.
With the two drivers so evenly matched, Hamilton was unable to fashion an overtaking manoeuvre on track but believes he should have been given the opportunity to mix up his strategy and pass in the pit stops.
"I'm here to race, so when you have to pit in the same order it's like it's already set from the beginning," he said. "If there was any other strategies I wanted to do them and take a risk and try to look after the tyres because I'm racing. But unfortunately today I couldn't get close enough to put on a great race, so it's relatively boring following in the tow.
"I was just trying to see if there were other strategy, I'm out there racing so I was looking for any kind of options -- surely there's not just two options for pit stops."
Hamilton did not agree with Rosberg's assertion that the No.6 Mercedes was quicker and, although he did not criticise Mercedes' strategy choice, he would have liked to have been given a Plan B.
"I think we have to rely on the team. As I said before, I was looking for whatever opportunities there may be because on the track it was not looking great, and contrary to what Nico was saying, at one stage I was all over him but I couldn't get by and just couldn't get close enough in the last few seconds.
"I had the fastest lap, so I obviously had the pace today, so it would be great to sometimes be able to do something different, rather than just say you're lap 15 and you're lap 16 and then lap 41 and lap 42, or whatever it was, to actually have some options. You know, to say 'Hey, do you want to do this or do you want to do that?' and see how it plays out. Ultimately they do so many strategic simulations and then pick the best two and that's what we are stuck with."
But Rosberg, who has more often been the driver in second place this year, disagrees and believes the two cars should be left to have a straight fight for victory without strategy mixing things up.
"It's been a discussion we have had many times, and the thing is that in advance you can only go by what the computer tells you is best. It wouldn't really be fair for the guy who is running second to go for the other strategy and it then turn out it was massively quicker. In hindsight after the race, imagine if he won the race just because of luck of the other strategy being so much quicker.
"That's the big problem in there and that's why it doesn't make sense in the battle between us two, because it should just be a battle of me against Lewis rather than luck of one strategy being better than the other. That's the reason behind it."