© LAT Images for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd
Mercedes’ technical boss James Allison reveals the team fixed Lewis Hamilton’s car “with a bit of tape and glue” after his crash with Max Verstappen.
Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen had a collision on the opening lap of the British Grand Prix, which sent Max crashing into the barrier, and left Lewis with some front wing damage.
Luckily for Lewis the race was then red flagged, which allowed Mercedes to perform some minor repairs on his car, repairs that involved “a bit of tape and glue”.
“The wing aerodynamically was completely unaffected by the incident,” James Allison said on Mercedes’ race debrief video.
“All the bits that generate the downforce, look after the performance of the car, they were just pukka and we knew very, very clearly what the balance of the car was with that wing on that day
“We didn’t need to disturb the car in any way by putting a new front wing on because the small manufacturing differences between the front wings might have given us a slightly different balance.
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“It was far more expedient just to fix the tiny bit of damage that we had incurred which was the breaking free of the front tyre temperature sensor from its mounting, just to quickly fix that with a bit of tape and glue rather than have to change the whole element.
“It was just the easiest thing for us to do at the time and the best way of ensuring that we would have identical performance after the restart from what we had before.”
Ultimately, Allison admits the team was very lucky because, had the damage been more substantial, there is no way the repairs could have been done so easily.
“We were lucky, the damage was pretty minor. We had a broken or nearly broken front left rim and also some relatively cosmetic damage to the front wing endplate, where a little sensor that we have that looks back at the tyres to measure their temperature had been broken off at its stalk and was just hanging by the sensor wire instead of the nice mounting that we make for it.”
