Mercedes explain how they repaired Lewis Hamilton’s car in just 3.5 hours in Austria
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Lewis Hamilton
Last weekend, on Friday, Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes looked very competitive in qualifying, even being potential contenders to start the race on pole. However, that quickly went away. On turn 7, Lewis Hamilton lost the car and went into the wall. The session was red-flagged and upon restart, George Russell did the same on the final corner of the track, ending Mercedes’ participation in qualifying.
This was certainly a disappointment for Mercedes, as it meant that at least Lewis Hamilton was on the back foot going into the race. But they had other concerns as well. The car’s chassis was damaged and basically had to be built from scratch, as explained by Mercedes technical director, Mike Elliot.
Apparently, Mercedes repaired Lewis Hamilton’s car in and around in only 3-and-a-half hours. In a video uploaded on Mercedes’ official YouTube channel, Mike Elliot explained how the team were able to achieve this feat in order for the car to be ready for the sprint race on Saturday.
Also Read: “We expect them to be quick,” Christian Horner wary of Mercedes’ threat in the upcoming French GP
“Mike Elliot: We [sort of] had to build the car from scratch”
As reported by CRASH, Elliot explained how Mercedes repaired Hamilton’s car: “There is a huge amount of work that went into getting those cars ready and in Lewis’s case he had done so much damage to the chassis, actually only cosmetic damage, but the damage that we couldn’t fix in the field. We had to sort of build his car from scratch on Saturday morning.”
“So, that car had to be built from nothing, fitting the engine, the gearbox, all the suspension, all of the sort of car systems that bolt around the chassis, all had to be put in place and the mechanics managed to do that in three and a half hours on Saturday morning, which is an amazing achievement, and all credit to them for actually getting us back out and into FP2.” adding that getting Hamilton’s car straight into FP2 gave them a good idea about how the car felt.
Unfortunately for Lewis Hamilton, he was stuck behind Haas’ Mick Schumacher (helped along by DRS from Kevin Magnussen) for a very long time, preventing him for making his way further up the field, and he started 8th on the grid for the feature race. During the race, Hamilton climbed to 3rd, while Russell was able to recover from a first-lap collision with Sergio Perez (and a 5-second time penalty, running 17th at one point) to finish 4th.
The next race in France at the Circuit Paul-Ricard, with its very smooth track surface, should definitely suit Mercedes, who have been better on the smoother circuits but struggled on street circuits (and the bumpier circuits) this season. Elliot says that Mercedes were encouraged by their first-lap pace, and hope to keep making steps forward to truly compete at the front consistently.
Also Read: Toto Wolff reveals Mercedes needs “two or three tenths” to challenge Red Bull and Ferrari
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Aniket Tripathi
(1002 Articles Published)