You're aware that the fastest lap in qualifying was nearly 5.5s quicker than the fastest lap in the race, yes? Do you have any inkling why that might be?
Yes, of course I have.
The real question is "have you?"
Not everything you hear on TV is important. Some of it is just the show; the way they like to put it out there. Even in the mid Sixties, when there was no such thing as tire changes in F1, qualifying times didn't match race times (bar weather changes). One lap is one test; 300km another.
Ferrari and Hamilton did an excellent job over the weekend and got their car where they needed it. Nobody is going to tell me that the engineers and the driver were secondary to pit calls. Strategy can lose races like Sundays when you do something stupid but it can't win them against superior performance on a track like Barcelona. The place is famous for how it demands performance. 'Strategy' often just hides underlying pace in fourth place or whatever, or alternately keeps drivers and cars artificially in the lead when they have disadvantage building all the time. Ultimately, a final round of pitstops
exposes the real order.
I'm just saying that too much attention is lavished on the mechanics of pitstop timing choices when there are obviously brilliant driving and engineering performances at the heart of victories and then all too often, poor underlying performance is ignored by blaming bad strategy. Ferrari have many times been pulled up for bad strategies when in fact they just weren't fast enough. It looks like the straw on the camel's back but it's just a distraction.
