Mercedes has given details on why one of Lewis Hamilton‘s pit stops took over 50 seconds to complete at the German Grand Prix last weekend.
After qualifying first and third, the world champions had a disastrous home race at Hockenheim with Hamilton finishing ninth and Valtteri Bottas crashing out from fourth. The race was going well for Mercedes until lap 29 when Hamilton crashed at the penultimate corner, broke his car’s front wing and immediately came into the pits for an unscheduled pit stop.
What followed was 50 seconds of chaos as the team had to react to the sight of Hamilton’s damaged car come down the pit lane just as they were expecting Bottas to come in for a new set of tyres. Initially the team fitted a set of slick tyres to Hamilton’s car only for the engineers to then decide the intermediate was the correct tyre to be on.
The pit stop looked like a mess and cost Hamilton and Bottas the lead of the race, but chief trackside engineer Andrew Shovlin said the team had very little time to react to the events.
“There was a lot of chaos when Lewis came in, but we were in the pits ready for Valtteri,” he explained. “Now, he decided to stay out and at the same time, Lewis had gone off track, hit the wall and broke the front wing, so 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.
“Now, it looked messy. There was a change of driver [from Bottas to Hamilton] on the tyre call and we also changed the tyre spec from a soft to an intermediate tyre and getting the communication through to the guys when everything is so chaotic is very difficult.
“We are aware it wasn’t pretty, the guys in the pits actually did a really good job reacting to that and we at least got the right tyres on the right car. But those situations are very difficult, and they are not rehearsed, they are not the ones we practice. But it does show us where we need to be stronger in the future.”
Both Mercedes cars dropped down the order as a result of the strategy errors and in the final stint of the race they both spun at Turn 1. Hamilton just about managed to keep the car out of the barriers, but Bottas’ race ended when he buried the front of his car in the wall.
“Both the cars spun in Turn 1 as you saw,” Shovlin explained. “There were two reasons. One, the balance was a little bit oversteer-ey for the conditions, we obviously hadn’t run in those cold, damp conditions during the weekend, we didn’t get it quite right.
“But there was also the dry line and then a damp patch and with both of them, they just got a wheel on there, lost a lot of grip and it triggered it into the spin.”