Mercedes state that Pirelli have taken away the tyre for their own investigation after George Russell complained of slow puncture in F1 Saudi Arabian GP.
There was scare for Mercedes and Russell towards the end of F1 Saudi Arabian GP when the Brit radioed about vibrations, suspecting of a slow puncture. The team double checked but found nothing troublesome in their data which can detect most things.
Since it was the end stages of the grand prix, Mercedes still conveyed Russell to take it easy and bring the car home in sixth. The team found nothing wrong with the car post-race, while Pirelli took the tyre with them for their internal investigation.
“He came on the radio, as you’ll have heard and said, ‘front right puncture’,” said Andrew Shovlin. “So he was concerned that he did. Now, what he was feeling was a vibration that suddenly appeared. He was concerned that it was the tyre that was losing air about to fail. But we can just look at our data and we can see that the tyre was fine in that sense.
“We can see the pressure on all four tyres live. So we would spot a puncture normally before even the driver sees it. Certainly, if it was a relatively slow puncture we’d say it before the driver. So we reassured him that that was fine. He said he could still feel a vibration. We checked the level of the vibration was nothing to concern us, we could see something, but it wasn’t out of the ordinary.
“We were able to check that the brakes are all fine, which is obviously one of the key things. So we went back again and said, well, car looks fine for us. We told him the gap to the car behind just so that he knows he doesn’t need to push. There’s no one within four seconds, and he can actually take it easy for the remainder of the lap.
“But when we got the car back, checked everything. That all looks fine. Now the tyre, we can’t check because that belongs to Pirelli. So they’ve taken that off for analysis. But as I said, everything we can see, it looks okay. There was vibration data, but that can be as little as you just get some of the rubber pick up can get stuck on a tyre, can actually put it quite out of balance.
“So we’ll let Pirelli do their investigations. But certainly from our side from the point of view of the car, there’s nothing that we can see that’s a problem,” summed up Shovlin, who also expanded on why Mercedes didn’t double stacked during safety car period and that they would have done it now in hindsight.
“With the benefit of hindsight, yes, we would have done that [double stacked],” said Shovlin. “Now, what we didn’t know at the time was whether there would be another incident. And the other thing we didn’t know, which is how durable the tyres were going to be.
“But that safety car that landed around lap seven, that was right on the point where we’re deciding whether we come in or not with both cars. Had it been lap eight, lap nine, then probably we would have done. The downside if you were Lewis, as the car behind, is that you need to build a gap and you’re not allowed to do that.
“You can’t just push people back on track when there is a safety car. They obviously can’t overtake you because you’ll get a penalty for obstructing them. So when George is being serviced in the box, Lewis would have had a wait. You’ve also got cars coming down the pit lane where if there’s a queue of cars coming down the pit lane, we can’t release George and Lewis is stuck there, and it was simply that we felt he would lose time.
“However, we were also covering our bases that if there was another safety car later on in the race, he would have been able to take the benefit from that. And then you’ve got cars on offset strategies. So as I said, if we knew what would have happened subsequently, for sure we’d have done them both.
“It would have been the right thing for Lewis. But at that point that it that it landed was right at the point of the race where we would have done just one and then two laps later would have done them both,” summed up Shovlin.
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