The puncture which struck Lewis Hamilton during the Qatar Grand Prix was not caused by the debris scattered when Valtteri Bottas hit a wing mirror, Mercedes believes.
Hamilton was one of two drivers who suffered punctures around the same time Bottas hit the mirror, which had fallen off Alexander Albon’s car. Race control initially issued yellow flags in reaction to the mirror but withdrew them without it being recovered.
FIA F1 race director Rui Marques was criticised by some for his decision not to use a Virtual Safety Car or Safety Car so marshals could recover the debris. The FIA explained his decision earlier this week.
Now Mercedes‘ head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin has revealed the team’s inspection of Hamilton’s damaged front-left tyre indicates the debris scattered when Bottas hit the mirror did not cause it to fail.
“We’ve obviously got the video data, we can see exactly when that mirror got smashed, when it got broken into a lot of pieces,” said Shovlin in a video published by the team. “We’ve also got the on-car data and we’re measuring the pressure in the tyres live.
“Now, surprisingly, we can see Lewis start to lose pressure prior to the mirror being hit by Valtteri. So from that we would say it’s unlikely that it was a debris puncture. That was certainly what we thought at the time because the two appeared to be almost simultaneous.”
Although the broken mirror does not appear to have caused Hamilton’s puncture, the possibility some other piece of debris triggered the failure cannot be ruled out, said Shovlin.
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“It doesn’t mean that he didn’t pick up some debris elsewhere, but we need to wait for [F1’s official tyre supplier] Pirelli to do their analysis and their investigations,” he said. “They’ll do a lot of detailed checks on all the tyres, trying to understand if there’s any deterioration.”
Hamilton was on lap 34 when he reported the puncture. Before the race Pirelli suggested drivers would go not further than lap 25 on a set of medium tyres before changing them.
“A huge amount of load goes through the front-left around Qatar, said Shovlin. “There were also bits of the tyre that were wearing quite heavily and again that’s linked to the fact that you’ve got these super fast corners that are flat out at nearly 300kph. So once we get that analysis, we will understand a bit more.”
Video from Sainz’s car also
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