Mercedes to launch REVIEW after Lewis Hamilton and George Russell incident

Mercedes

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Mercedes to launch REVIEW after Hamilton and Russell incident

Mercedes are going to take matters into their own hands after the events that unfolded at Spa

Matthew Hobkinson Lead Editor

F1 Editor & Journalist

Thursday 3 August 2023 11:27

Mercedes chief technical officer Mike Elliott has admitted that the team will 'review the footage' of Lewis Hamilton and George Russell after the pair were involved in some late drama during Saturday's sprint shootout.

At the end of sprint qualifying in Spa, the Mercedes duo were sent out together late on in the session. Both drivers believed that they had to rush to make the line before the chequered flag, yet in reality they had more time than they first thought.

As a result, Hamilton was right behind Russell as he was starting his final flying lap. The man from King's Lynn then made an error at the top of Raidillon and not only ruined his own lap but forced his team-mate to back out of the throttle too.

And now Elliott has revealed that the team will review the incident to work out what went wrong when he was asked about it during Mercedes' race debrief on their official YouTube channel.

Mercedes to review Spa incident

Lewis Hamilton out on the intermediate tyre during the sprint race at Spa

“In order to explain that [how the incident happened], I think I first need to explain how difficult it is to get right in the first place," he said.

“When you’ve got a track that is drying, it is nearly always the case that the quickest lap is going to be the very last lap of the run.

“And so your first laps are about getting a banker lap in, and then as you get to the end of the session you want to be at the right place so you are just about crossing the line at the end of the session with your tyres in the right window.

“So we are pretty much heading towards that, but what we could see was that in the last corner, in [turns] 18 and 19, where you sort of get to open the lap, there was a lot of queuing, a lot of cars there.

“And so we were worried about trying to get over that line before the session ended. And we were asking our drivers to speed up. They thought they had less time available than they really did. And as a result of that, we ended up with two cars too close together.

“As it happened. I think a number of cars were disadvantaged. A number of the cars were far too close together, so we weren't the only ones that were struggling.

“Unfortunately for us, two drivers tripping over each other, pretty much meant that we didn't get the laps that we wanted and therefore didn't get the sprint qualifying result we really hoped for...

“We will review the footage, we'll review the radio communications, we'll see what learnings we can extract and work out how we can improve for the future. I am definitely sure that there are some learnings we can extract from this weekend.”