Mercedes technical director James Allison feels that the team made the wrong strategy call when it came to Lewis Hamilton's pitstop at the Monaco GP. Hamilton was the first of the front runners to pit in an attempt to undercut his main rivals but it came to no avail as Pierre Gasly just stayed in front to the fury of Hamilton who finished in seventh place. "I can understand why he's unhappy because effectively we lost a chunk of places with the strategy call we made," Allison told RacingNews365.com and other select members of the press. "It's always a finely balanced call and today we picked the wrong option. Lewis still had some rubber left on the tyre for what would have been a few decent laps. "But the chances are that, Gasly probably wouldn't have stopped anytime soon and our fear was that Gasly was simply just going to stay out there as a roadblock forever. "We had a window behind where we could where we could do an attempted undercut and unfortunately we weren't able to enough lap time in our outlap." Sebastian Vettel and Sergio Perez also managed to jump Hamilton in the pitstop phase. Perez's fourth place allowed Red Bull to go to the top of the Drivers' and Constructors' Championship for the first time since 2013. "Gasly's pace after the stop was so, so slow that it allowed Vettel and then Perez in turn to leapfrog the pair of us," said Allison. "We didn't have good options either way because it was Gasly's gift for when he stopped if we wanted to do the overcut and we felt that would have been a long way distant. "We had to make the undercut stick in order to then stop the world falling on our heads as it did today. Sadly, by choosing the undercut and not making it work, the world did fall on our heads with the subsequent loss of places to Vettel and Perez."
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