CrowdStrike ‘minimal impact’ on Mercedes

In brief

CrowdStrike outage had ‘minimal impact’ on Mercedes

After an service outage for American cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike led to severe disruption across the globe, including for Mercedes’ trackside F1 operations, the team’s trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin insisted that the impact on their practice programme was negligible.

“We’ve had great support from [CrowdStrike] and all our partners,” Shovlin said.

“There was a bit of work that we had to do. We’ve got a lot of computers around the garage and in pit walls and things here, and those all needed updating, but we’ve worked through that. The impact in FP1 was minimal, if not nil. So, as I said, it created a bit of work, but we’re back where we need to be now.”

Tsunoda hit by suspension fault

RB racing director Alan Permane says that Yuki Tsunoda suffered a suspension problem which compromised his running in yesterday’s second practice session, even though he completed 13 laps.

“Unfortunately, Yuki’s car had a problem with the front suspension setup in second practice,” Permane explained.

“We figured out what the problem was, but we couldn’t fix it in time, so he really didn’t have any sort of FP2 this afternoon.”

Injured Rossi ruled out of Toronto weekend

Alexander Rossi will take no further part in this weekend’s IndyCar race at Toronto after breaking his right thumb in a crash during practice. McLaren is yet to announce who will replace him in their number seven car.

Vergne quickest in London Eprix practice

Jean-Eric Vergne set the fastest time in the opening practice session for the Formula E season-ending London EPrix, with Mitch Evans the fastest of the championship contenders.

The DS Penske driver set the pace ahead of today’s first of two races to conclude the 2024 championship, with Evans in fourth, half a tenth behind Vergne. Evans’ Jaguar team mate and championship leader Nick Cassidy was 11th-quickest, while Pascal Wehrlein, tied on points with Evans heading into the final weekend, was 13th.

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