Lewis Hamilton: Mercedes explain how Brit's German GP fell apart

Lewis Hamilton

Mercedes explain how Hamilton's German GP fell apart

An awful weekend for Lewis.

Martin Macdonald

Wednesday 31 July 2019 13:50

Mercedes have provided an explanation as to how Lewis Hamilton’s German Grand Prix challenge disentegrated, after the Brit’s pit crew took nearly a minute to fix a damaged front wing on his car.

Hamilton was already a doubt to actually take part in the race as he was suffering from an illness bug, but powered through to feature from pole position, with things starting well enough from Lights Out.

He and team-mate Valtteri Bottas sped away from the pack initially, but as the rain on the track started to play a role, Mercedes struggled. On lap 32, he became a victim of the slick surface at the ‘drag’ area of the lap and drifted into the barrier which caused his front wing to completely detach.

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Hamilton wanted it fixed quickly, so went into the pitlane basically unannounced, meaning the engineers were not prepared for his arrival. They took around 50 seconds to make the car driveable which, to put into context, came in the same race as Red Bull breaking the world record for a pitstop with a stoppage of just 1.88 seconds.

The Silver Arrows have now explained why it took so long.

"There was a lot of chaos when Lewis came in, but we were in the pits ready for Valtteri," trackside engineering director Andrew Shovelin on the Pure Pit Wall debrief.

Hamilton 60 second pit chaos#F1 #GermanGP pic.twitter.com/XfiMGCgoRo
— Alex Huyberechts (@cfcalex98) July 28, 2019

"He decided to stay out. At the same time, Lewis had gone off track, hit the wall, broke the front wing. He came in.

"We could see that he was coming in, but it takes the guys a little while to get the different tyres out. But, also, we had this broken nose and we can’t lift the car on that to do the normal change with the jack. So, we had to get different kit out to do that."

Hamilton ended up finishing outside of the top 10, but was eventually promoted to ninth after penalties were given to Kimi Raikkonen and Antonio Giovinazzi.