Mercedes announce Hamilton 'SERIOUS' punishment close

Mercedes have revealed just how close seven-time Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton came to a 'serious' penalty at the Brazilian Grand Prix.

Barring a run in Ayrton Senna's 1990 McLaren, it was a torrid weekend for Hamilton in Sao Paulo, knocked out early in qualifying and only finishing the race in 10th.

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Hamilton also only finished down in 11th in the sprint race on Saturday, making for a total of 1 point taken from the whole weekend.

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Mercedes' FIA punishment confirmed

It wasn't a much better weekend for the wider Mercedes team, either, who were fined for a tire pressure infringement by the FIA after the race.

The incident happened during an aborted start to the main race following Lance Stroll's unfortunate spin, which pushed the starting procedure back.

Now, Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin has revealed how this start line confusion led to the team being given the fine, and how the penalty could have been even bigger for their star man and his team-mate George Russell.

"The issue was when we got the message for the restart, that was straight into 10 minutes to go," Shovlin explained on Mercedes' YouTube channel.

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"Now, the tires must be fitted to the car at five minutes to go, and that meant we only had a few minutes to get the tires down to the car, get them onto the car, and get them checked by the FIA.

"The added complication was that the set that we had called for, which was not the set on the racks but a set on wheelie boards so we could move them, hadn't been bled down to race pressures at that point.

"So the engineers will be calling for different tire pressures, the tire technicians are then running around trying to make sure all the sets are done and these sets weren't done, so once we got them down to the car we were up against that five-minute limit which is a serious penalty if you don't make that.

"The penalty we got was actually because we didn't have time for the FIA checks to be done."

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