The United States Grand Prix was a weekend to forget for Mercedes, mainly for Lewis Hamilton. They arrived at Austin at a good pace thanks to the improvements incorporated into their car, but everything went wrong, especially with regard to Sunday’s race. In qualifying, the seven-time world champion had problems and finished penultimate, only beating Guanyu Zhou, and George Russel had an accident in Q3. Later in the race, the ’63’ came back with a great test, but his teammate’s hell continued and he abandoned the race very soon.
The ’44’ ended his bad weekend on American soil with an off-track on the third lap, which made him say goodbye to the test and caused the safety car to leave after a long time without appearing. The competitor’s frustration was evident and pointed to the latest improvements, while Totto Wolff took the focus away from there.
Hamilton’s explanation for his accident
Despite starting at a disadvantage due to his poor classification, the future Ferrari driver turned it around with a good start, for him the best he has achieved in a long time. But, on lap 3 he went off in a way that is difficult to explain: “I wasn’t even attacking at that point, I was just trying to drive and get the tires up to temperature. But, the car started to bounce“The left front part bounced and I lost the rear part of the car.” In addition, he points out that this was something very similar to what his partner suffered the previous day in the same area of the circuit.
Lewis Hamilton racing in Austin
Like many other teams, in this test after a break, the silver arrows cars were testing new improvements. That’s where Lewis believes the origin of the failures in Austin is: “If I hadn’t had that bounce on that lap, I think it would have happened later, because something was wrong with the car. It was the same for most of the weekend with the new package we introduced. It turned out to be harmful“But that’s the way things are.” After what happened, he assured that they will have to investigate their mistakes to make a decision on the package to use in this week’s Mexican Grand Prix.
Mercedes contradicts him
After the test, Toto Wolff, Mercedes’ main team, also spoke about what happened. It is in these statements that he takes a position contrary to his broker: “Let’s continue with the update, there is no point in not doing it. There’s a lot of lap time you leave on the table. However, you have to have a very open mind.” The Great Circus does not stop and they will not have much time to make their final decision for the test at the Rodríguez Brothers circuit.
In what has been a difficult event for his team, he does not believe that the two accidents of his two cars in Austin can be related. What they do agree on is the blame for what happened in the race: “100% of the car, I think it wasn’t even pushing at that moment. Today, in a situation like this, there was wind and there was a bit of dirty air…We have a problem. Lewis Hamilton definitely does not lose the car in this way.” Whether one or the other is right, they must work together to get to Mexico in the best possible way and leave what happened in the United States behind.
