Mercedes working through night to address front wing failure

Mercedes is revising the W05 front wing for Wednesday’s testing in Jerez following Lewis Hamilton’s failure today.

Hamilton hit the tyre wall at Turn One after the wing fell under his front wheels.

“We had a rather dramatic failure of the front wing,” said Paddy Lowe. “The front wing went underneath the car, and a fair few parts disintegrated in a cloud. Lewis hit the barrier. He’s absolutely fine. He’s not driving tomorrow, the plan was always to put Nico in the car for tomorrow. Lewis will be back in on Thursday.

“It’s not a great way to go through our first testing, but we’re working hard to recover. It’s also difficult to recover on Day One when there are not a lot of spare parts around us, but we intend to be out there tomorrow morning, so we’re working hard through the night to do that, both here and in the UK.

“We know where it failed, and we’re just trying to understand exactly why the margin wasn’t sufficient in that area. These are things that we test extensively and model, there’s a lot of work in a laboratory, so it is a confusing situation for us. But we’re working hard this afternoon and through the night to come up with a solution for tomorrow.”

Meanwhile Lowe said it had been a good day for Mercedes prior to the problem.

“It was going very well. We had the advantage of having been to Silverstone on Friday, so we were well placed to get out this morning right on time. We had a few issues which we hadn’t expected, but in general it was going well, we were building up to longer runs, and it was just at that point that we unfortunately had the failure. It was shaping up to be a very good day. And as it was we achieved a lot in the half day we ran.”