Mercedes issued ‘overreaction’ warning after shock George Russell Spa disqualification

Former Aston Martin and McLaren strategist Bernie Collins has said Mercedes need to avoid “overreacting” to George Russell’s disqualification at the Belgian Grand Prix by adding too much weight to their car at Zandvoort.

Team principal Toto Wolff admitted the team needed to take the disqualification “on the chin” after Russell lost victory on Sunday, with he and his car combined having been found to have been 1.5kg underweight after the chequered flag, having finished first.

Mercedes warned to avoid ‘overreacting’ with disqualification ‘an outlier’

Given the variety of factors in play that could have made the car underweight, Collins went into detail about the aspects of the car that do and do not change weight during a race, though explained that the difference in the weight of tyres could be a significant factor too.

Even still, given the anomaly that surrounded Russell being removed from the race, she believes Mercedes should not look too far in the other direction to be safe for the weight limit, given that any extra weight costs time during a race.

Speaking on the Sky Sports F1 podcast surrounding the disqualification, Collins explained: “Weighing something is one of the easiest measurements to take. So it’s a slam dunk, if we like, that it was a breach of technical regulations, he was going to be excluded, and there’s no excuse for it.

“You know, it’s a race engineer’s responsibility that the car is legal, and I guess the only other thing to add to that is this is the second time in two years that we’ve seen Mercedes be excluded for legality.

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“So how does that happen? F1 is all about pushing the margins. Russell finished half a second ahead of Lewis, so tiny differences are massive in this game in terms of the car weight and you’re trying to get the car to the minimum weight you possibly can, in order to have the biggest advantage throughout the race.

“So, 10 kilos is probably three tenths each lap, so a kilo is .03 a lap – so it really adds up over the course of the race.

“My belief, obviously, we don’t have all the information. As you know, all the engineers do a very good job of trying to estimate all of those losses and calculate what they need to add into the car at the start.

“But George did an exceptional 34-lap stint on a set of hard tyres, when we were expecting 15 laps on a set of tyres, so the tyre engineer from Mercedes will have estimated the loss in the tyres.

“Now, a new set of tyres, four brand-new tyres between the heaviest and the lightest set of brand-new tyres can be 1.2 kilos, and that’s a brand-new set of tyres.

“So you can imagine the differences in the wear rate is many times that between a new and a worn set of tyres. And I think that’s partly what happened is they’ve underestimated the wear that potentially the tyres would bring to the race, and that’s what’s led to being underweight.

“I listened to all of their radio yesterday, there’s no panic on the radio to George or Lewis about saving fuel or managing anything.

“It just seems to be an underestimation on behalf of the engineering side as to how much the car would be light at the end of the race.

“Maybe it’s naivety on my part, I don’t get the impression they’re trying to fudge the rules because every car was weighed, you know the car is going to be weighed. So if you’re trying to fudge anything in the rules, this is a really dangerous thing to try and fudge.

“I think it’s just a bit of an anomaly. The thing to be careful of now is not overreacting next week, you don’t want to suddenly be adding kilos of margin for everything. I think this is a bit of an outlier because of what happened in Spa.”

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