24th May 2015: The Calculation That Cost The Race

On the 24th of May, three Monaco Grands Prix separated by seventeen years each asked the same question of the teams on the pit wall — and got three very different answers. In 1998, Mika Häkkinen and McLaren answered it perfectly, delivering a grand chelem while the field destroyed itself around them.In 2009, Ross Brawn's improbable championship-leading team answered it with patience and precision, running Jenson Button to a fifth win in six races. In 2015, Mercedes got it wrong — a single miscalculation on lap sixty-five handing Nico Rosberg a race that Lewis Hamilton had led by nineteen seconds.Elsewhere in the episode: Jim Clark's dominant, wire-to-wire victory at the 1964 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, and a birthday tribute to Ivan Capelli — the Italian who stood on the Estoril podium in 1988, discovered he had a retroactive one from Spa he never knew about, and then led forty-five laps of the 1990 French Grand Prix before an oil warning light took it all away. Cover image: By Kd1980 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, LinkSend us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering