In the round-up: George Russell is confident Mercedes will be stronger at Monza following their slump last weekend.
In brief
Mercedes can reverse Zandvoort dip – Russell
Russell believes Mercedes understand why they went from winners before the summer break at Spa-Francorchamps to behind their rivals last weekend in Zandvoort.
“Zandvoort was definitely a tough one, but it’s been a great couple of days because I think we’ve really sort of understood where the problems lied and what we need to do to improve this weekend,” Russell told the official F1 channel.
“There doesn’t seem to be any correlation, circuit-to-circuit. Zandvoort was high downforce, the same as Montreal – both were cold. Montreal, we were on pole. Zandvoort, we were six tenths off. So it’s a bit confusing this sport sometimes, but we’re confident we found a reason why we were uncompetitive in Zandvoort. We’re going to be sort of reversing on that change for this weekend.
“But it’s all change again – totally re-Tarmac-ed here, so the Tarmac’s really dark – it’s going to retain a huge amount of heat. We’ll probably see like 60 degrees [Celsius] of track temperature, so the tyres will be sort of burning up as we’re driving. But just excited and feeling confident within myself to have a good weekend.”
New race engineer for Tsunoda
Yuki Tsunoda has a new race engineer from this weekend’s Italian Grand Prix.
His previous engineer Mattia Spini – who also engineered for Pierre Gasly and Danil Kvyat at the team – has moved to a more senior role within RB. RB has assigned Ernesto Desiderio to be Tsunoda’s new race engineer.
Today will not be the first time Tsunoda and Desiderio work together, as the team gave them the opportunity to do so in previous first practice sessions in preparation for the change.
Dry ice banned from junior series
Formula 2 and Formula 3 team are forbidden from using dry ice to cool their cars prior to race sessions as of this weekend.
Teams were previously permitted to use dry ice in radiator ducts and the front of the radiator itself, but there have been several instances of teams reporting rivals to the stewards for dropping dry ice onto the circuit during races. Prema drivers Andrea Kimi Antonelli and Oliver Bearman will both take five place grid penalties for Saturday’s F2 sprint race after the stewards from the Spa round enacted a suspended penalty from Silverstone for multiple breaches of the dry ice…
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