George Russell won praise for his role in an audacious strategy which put him in front at the Belgian Grand Prix.
It also won him the race – for around two-and-a-half hours, until he was disqualified. A post-race investigation discovered his Mercedes was one-and-a-half kilograms under the minimum weight limit. That’s an infringement of the technical regulations and the penalty was never likely to be anything less than disqualification.
After the race Mercedes admitted they had suspicions that Russell’s strategy had contributed to his disqualification. While their closest rivals all made two pit stops, Russell gambled on making it to the end with just one.
“It’s really tough for George to have been disqualified from the win after such an impressive drive,” said Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin. “He did a brilliant job to hang onto the tyres and defend to the finish.
“We don’t yet understand why the car was underweight following the race but will investigate thoroughly to find the explanation. We expect that the loss of rubber from the one stop was a contributing factor, and we’ll work to understand how it happened.”
Tyres shed rubber as they wear, forming the off-line ‘marbles’ which drivers are at pains to avoid. The loss of rubber means they become lighter, which is a factor the teams have to take into account in order to ensure they stay above the minimum weight limit.
None of this is new to teams, so Mercedes’ suspicions about the role Russell’s strategy played in his disqualification may seem surprising. After all, Russell used a one-stop strategy in the Belgian Grand Prix last year, so surely Mercedes should have been alert to the potential implications of doing so again?
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This isn’t the first disqualification for a Mercedes car in recent history. Last year Lewis Hamilton lost his second place finish in the United States Grand Prix when his car’s plank failed a post-race thickness check.
On that occasion the team blamed a mistake in its set-up choices due to the lack of practice time available on a sprint race weekend at the bumpy Circuit of the Americas circuit where the ride height setting is particularly critical. A shortage of relevant data may have been a contributing factor this weekend.
Mercedes ran a new floor specification on their cars during Friday practice. They…
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