Mercedes team representative Bradley Lord has opened up about the damage George Russell’s W16 had sustained following his collision with Charles Leclerc, the subsequent loss of performance, and the team order issued to swap places with Kimi Antonelli during the F1 Dutch GP on Sunday.
After managing to set the fifth-fastest time in qualifying, Russell lost a place off the line to Leclerc in Sunday’s race. While the deployment of the first Safety Car on Lap 23 allowed him to retake the position, the Monégasque muscled his way past the Mercedes driver on Lap 33 when the VSC ended.
The move that played out through Turns 10-12 left both drivers unhappy. Once the pair made contact, Russell complained that Leclerc had overtaken him off the track at Turn 12. Meanwhile, the Ferrari driver criticised the Brit over the radio, stating that he had not left him adequate racing room.
Leclerc’s aggressive manoeuvre inflicted substantial damage on the W16’s floor. Eventually, the Mercedes pit wall instructed Russell to let Kimi Antonelli through, moving the Italian up to P6 as he attempted to chase down the eight-time race winner with just over 30 laps to go.
Following Antonelli’s dramatic clash with Leclerc and Lando Norris’s shock retirement, Russell ultimately took the chequered flag in fourth place at Zandvoort. In the meantime, the rookie received a 10-second time penalty and finished outside the points.
Magnitude of Russell’s floor damage
In the post-Dutch GP F1 Akkodis Race Debrief, Mercedes’s Chief Communications Officer Bradley Lord commented on the extent of the damage Russell’s floor had suffered due to his contact with Leclerc’s Ferrari.
Hailing the damage as quite significant, Lord elaborated on how the contact had not only resulted in the loss of critical lap time but also negatively impacted the handling of Russell’s car. Additionally, he commended the four-time race winner for bringing the impaired car home and scoring 12 points that are crucial to Mercedes’s ongoing battle with Ferrari for P2 in the Constructors’ Championship.
“It was pretty substantial damage. You could see it on TV and on the replays, bits of the floor falling off the sort of floor edge, which is super important, not just for the downforce, actually for the handling characteristic as well.
“So George [Russell] lost enough performance to cost him anywhere up to three quarters of a second a lap.
“So it was substantial, but also it changed the handling characteristics of the car as well. He was having to cope with the loss of performance and being effectively down on lap time, but then also adjusting and adapting to a car that was starting to behave in a pretty unpleasant way at points.
“So yeah, fighting with one hand tied behind his back and in the end did a brilliant job to get it to P4 and score the points that we did.”
Mercedes issued team order to secure better overall results
Asked if the considerable damage Russell was carrying had prompted the team order, Bradley Lord confirmed that the pit wall had instructed the 27-year-old to swap places with Antonelli in the hope of securing a better finish in Sunday’s race.
Although he revealed that Antonelli had run over some residual debris from Russell’s collision with Leclerc during Sunday’s chaotic Dutch GP, Lord maintained that the Italian’s W16 was competitive enough to justify the swap.
Stating that it was a conventional team directive, the Mercedes representative also emphasised how the Italian rookie had managed to close in on Leclerc and put more strategy choices into play before he crashed into the Monégasque on Lap 53 of the 72-lap race.
“Yeah, it was exactly that. George, we knew he was down on performance, we knew Kimi [Antonelli] had a healthy car. He had actually run over some debris as well from that same collision, but he had the pace.
“We therefore asked the drivers to invert, which is a normal team instruction that we will deploy from time to time if we think it can help the team overall score more points.
“And Kimi was then able to stretch his legs, start closing down Leclerc in front and start pressuring the Ferrari, which brought some other strategic options into play.”
