Mercedes head of track operations Andrew Shovlin admits that an unexpectedly long stretch on hard tires could be the cause of George Russell’s car being too light due to the loss of mass in the tyres, which led to a crash at post-race technical inspection.
Russell and Mercedes decided to gamble and try to finish the race with just one stop after seeing that the degradation on the hard tires (C2) was less than expected. This happened even though Mercedes did not plan such a strategy, which is confirmed by the opening section on medium tires of only ten laps and which required a second section of as many as 34 laps on hard.
Mercedes obviously did not plan such an extremely long stretch on one set of tires, which led to greater consumption and greater loss of mass, and ultimately up to 1.5 kg too light car.
“We still don’t understand why the car was too light after the race, but we will do a thorough investigation to find an explanation,” Shovlin said.
“We expect that the loss of tire mass with the one-stop strategy was a contributing factor, and we will work to understand how this happened.” “However, we will not make excuses. Obviously it wasn’t good enough and we have to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
The difference of 1.5 kg means that on average each tire was 0.375 kg too light, which is quite possible considering that a tire loses about one kilogram on average during one section, as confirmed by Pirelli’s Mario Isola.
“Usually, we talked about this a few days ago, it should be about one kilogram,” Isola said.
“Given that he is 1.5 kilograms under the limit, it is possible on four tires. That’s a figure that’s possible.” Mercedes boss Toto Wolff says they didn’t plan for a one-stop strategy to be possible at all, which means that’s probably why Russell’s car was too light at the end of the race.
“We have these race planners, who tell us where the cars will finish at the end and at some stage we saw that we had to cover Piastri and Leclerc with Lewis,” Wolff said.
“No one expected that the hard would last so long and therefore the team stayed on the track. And then our planners said fifth place for George was the best we could hope for either way, either with one or two stops.”
“So we said – ‘Let’s gamble’. Both drivers felt happy with the tires at that stage, but with Lewis we had to do it to cover the other cars and the tire remained quite good in terms of performance until the end.
