Lewis Hamilton has Mercedes crew to thank for avoiding disaster as boss details epic feat

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Mercedes mechanics took just three-and-a-half hours to fix Lewis Hamilton’s car ‘from scratch’ following the Briton’s Austrian Grand Prix qualifying crash, the team’s technical director Mike Elliott has revealed. Hamilton lost control of his car at Turn Seven after a gust of wind forced him off track, with the 37-year-old crashing into the barriers. 

The seven-times world champion’s W13 required a new chassis following the accident. Mechanics worked hard to prepare Hamilton for FP2. 

And technical director Elliott has gone into incredible detail about how staff took just three-and-a-half hours to fix the problems. Hamilton ended up finishing third in Austria to seal his third podium of the season. 

“There is a huge amount of work that went into getting those cars ready and in Lewis’s case, he had done so much damage to the chassis, actually only cosmetic damage, but damage that we couldn’t fix in the field. We had to sort of build his car from scratch on Saturday morning,” Elliott told Mercedes’ Race Debrief. 

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“So that car had to be built from nothing, fitting the engine, the gearbox, all the suspension, all of the sort of car systems that bolt around the chassis, all had to be put in place and the mechanics managed to do that in three and a half hours on Saturday morning. Which is an amazing achievement, and all credit to them for actually getting us back out and into FP2.

“And the advantage of getting out into FP2 is that you can actually make sure that the set-up on Lewis’s car was right, that the balance was right and that he was happy with the car in time for [the] Sprint.”

Hamilton was able to secure third-place while team-mate George Russell came fourth. He praised the Mercedes mechanics who fixed his car following his crash in qualifying. 

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“It’s been a bit of a rough weekend but I’m really grateful. As a team, we got a third and fourth. That’s great points. And we move forward from here,” Hamilton said.

“I do really want to say a big thank you to the guys, the men and women in the garage, who worked so hard to rebuild the car. I had a brand-new car on Saturday morning. 

“Unfortunately, something I don’t do too often [crashing], but so thankful to them for working so hard and we made some improvements this weekend, so we just have to keep chipping away.”

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