Alex was forced to run a three-stop strategy during US race after Pirelli banned Red Bull from using his only set of hard tyres. Why the ban? I'll let Christian through racefans.net explain:-
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner revealed after the race a problem had been discovered with one of Albon’s hard tyres on Saturday.
“Unfortunately we couldn’t use the hard tyre with Alex today because on an install lap yesterday, it got what they call a ‘cold crack’. So Pirelli wouldn’t allow the use of that tyre and because it had done an install lap it couldn’t be replaced. So that wasn’t a strategic option available to him anyway today.”
Horner added the fault was “a little bit strange, you only see it when you’ve run the tyre, and I think it was a circumstance of the cold weather.”
Extract courtesy Racefans.net, 4th Nov 19. How can it be right that Max can have a complete change of a cracked rear wing on the grid ahead of the race yet his teammate is prevented from taking a new set of tyres which show a similar huge safety problem???
However since Albon put in a sizzling performance to get so high up finishing order, after early his shunt, maybe Red Bull will not be claiming money back for goods of unsatisfactory quality from Pirelli.
The question that's still in the air though is - could Alex have caught Ferrari with one less pit stop?
A pit stop cost about 22secs and various extra re-passes probably cost another 20secs at least! Guess we'll never know.