© Steve Etherington for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
A huge crash with George Russell at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix left Valtteri Bottas’ car almost completely destroyed. Mercedes reveals initial damage evaluation results.
After the race Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff and chief engineer Andrew Shovlin revealed that the damage might eat away at the team’s budget, under the newly imposed budget cap.
Now the initial evaluation of the damage has been done and Shovlin reveals what the team has found.
“As much as we like our car, we like Valtteri more, and happily he was able to come out of that with not much more than a bruised knee from the impact,” Shovlin said during Mercedes’ Emilia Romagna Grand Prix debrief.
“It was a big crash, we were seeing around 30g at points in his trip around the walls and the track. Unfortunately, the car has not done quite so well. There is a fair amount of damage to that.
“We have managed to bring a lot of it back to the UK, we got the power unit at Brixworth where that’s being checked and inspected carefully, and we will just pick through this and some of the bits we might be able to salvage.
“Unfortunately, quite a lot of it is damaged beyond repair and we are just looking at a logistics plan to try and be able to get sufficient parts to Portimão, which is the week after next, to make sure we can run both cars in the correct spec.
If you like SilverArrows.Net, consider supporting us by buying us a coffee!
Shovlin also further explained the reasons behind Bottas struggling in P9, which ultimately led to his crash with Russell.
“Valtteri was finding it hard to get close to other cars on the intermediate tyres, he was struggling for temperature, and that lack of temperature particularly early in the race just manifested itself as a lack of grip.
“In particularly for Valtteri, when he got close, as close as you would need to be to get a passing move, the front grip was dropping and he was washing out and couldn’t really follow at a distance that would allow him to pass.
“The other factor was that in that intermediate stage, the DRS isn’t enabled. And when you can get in the tow, when you can trigger DRS, you can actually gain around six tenths of a second just from the combined effect of those two things.
“So that was something that wasn’t available to Valtteri at that stage which was to Lewis later on, but the key thing was really just the balance of the car, the understeer that he was picking up when he got close and the fact that that meant that he couldn’t get the gap down to enough to launch an attack,” the Briton concluded.
