Mike Elliott, Mercedes' Technical Director, revealed that another crash in the sprint race could compromise the main event on Sunday
Mercedes finished the Austrian GP scoring well once again, with Lewis Hamilton taking the podium and George Russell fourth. But it was a busy weekend for the German team's mechanics after both cars crashed in qualifying. Hamilton had major damage, and his car had to be rebuilt from scratch before the second free practice on Saturday.
"When you crash two cars, it's always going to be a very difficult weekend," said Mike Elliott, Mercedes' technical director. "We did a lot of damage to the cars. We broke both floorboards, both rear wings, we damaged the suspension quite a bit, on Lewis' car we also damaged the front wing and some aesthetic damage to the chassis," the manager said in a video from the German team.
"So [it's] damage that we can repair, but not in one weekend. That meant we had to completely rebuild Lewis' car from scratch and also make a new floorboard. We had one extra [floorboard] that we could put in and we had to make the best of the two broken ones to build another one," Elliott said.
In addition to the damage that had to be repaired and the floorboard redone, Mercedes suffered from a lack of parts. The team only had a new rear wing available, and Russell ended up having to use an older version with more downforce and which was not as well suited to the Spielberg circuit.
"We were compromised on George's rear wing because we only had one extra rear wing, which we chose to fit to Lewis' car because he would have to climb the pack, which meant that George had a rear wing that probably didn't have the ideal level of downforce. It was a bit much for that circuit," Mike explained.
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The problem was so big that Mercedes feared they would not be able to race on Sunday if their drivers were involved in accidents in the sprint race. In the end, the two Brits survived and got important points in the Austrian GP.
"Having damaged both cars as much as it was on Friday, the drivers [were] now in a position where, if we damaged the cars in the sprint race, we could be in a position of not racing on Sunday. So all of this has to be taken into consideration and this compromises the weekend a lot," the Mercedes technical director concluded.
Formula One now returns on July 24 for the French GP at the Paul Ricard circuit.