In qualifying for the Austrian Grand Prix the Mercedes they were great protagonists. Unfortunately for them, in the negative. Reached Q3, in fact first Lewis Hamilton and then George Russell they collided violently against the Red Bull Ring barriers, damaging the cars and forcing the team to overtime to repair them. The Mercedes garage, however, not only had to surgically operate the W13s, but also made choices. Indeed, there were complete spare parts for one car only. And both had broken the bottom and rear wing, damaging the suspension, chassis and – in Hamilton’s case – even the front wing.
So, what to do in these cases? Mercedes chose to save Hamilton’s car, which started from tenth position in the Sprint and therefore needed new parts more, and to give Russell the best of the ‘shards’ of the two carstrying to build a bottom and a rear wing as efficient as possible: “We had spare parts that we could fit and we had to make the most of the two crashed bottoms to build another one; this meant cto compromise George’s rear wing because we only had a complete spare rear wingTechnical director Mike Elliott told the channels Mercedes. “We chose to fit the new parts on Lewis’s car because he would have had to put in more positions. George had to fit a rear wing which probably it did not guarantee the ideal level of downforce. Furthermore, after rebuilding the cars, we also had to fine-tune the set-up. The time available in FP2 was very limited and this would have required another compromise. But it is not just a technical issue, but also a practical one: having damaged two cars on Friday, the drivers found themselves in a position where, if we had also reported damage in the Sprint, we would have risked not racing on Sunday. All of this must be taken into consideration, because it compromises you on the weekend“.
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