Mercedes highlight their weaknesses as Red Bull fight continues in Portugal

F1: Can Lewis Hamilton do it again?

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Lewis Hamilton’s off-track excursions at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix may have cost him precious time during the race, as the Mercedes driver calved his way back through the pack, but a lengthy pit stop made his job even harder in Imola.

Pit stop issues started in Bahrain for Valtteri Bottas, after a wheel gun problem led to the Finn sitting stationary for over 10 seconds.

And Mercedes’ pit stop problems continued in Imola, as the seven-time world champion was held stationary for four minutes while waiting for an Alfa Romeo to pass, with added problems attaching the right-front wheel during his first pitstop on lap 28.

And Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin says it’s an area of real concern for the team.

Speaking in a video on YouTube posted by the team, Shovlin admitted: “It is fair to say that we’re not the best.

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“We are losing time in the pit stops and it’s an area that we have been focusing on for a while now.

“In particular, in Lewis’ stop, we did have an issue with one of the guns and in the next stop we actually changed to a different gun. And that seemed to resolve that issue. And also there was a short hold – we had to hold him for around four tenths of a second because [Antonio] Giovinazzi was coming down the pit lane just at the point that Lewis was ready to go.

“There were some specific instances that affected us in the race at Imola,” added Shovlin, “and we’ll look to work on those. But longer term we’re still looking at what we can do with the crew, with the equipment to try and get a bit more time on those stops.”

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The rain pelted down just before the start in Italy, with Max Verstappen starting third behind his teammate Sergio Perez, with Hamilton on pole.

But drama unfolded early, with Lance Stoll complaining his brakes were on fire, Fernando Alonso put his Alpine into the barriers and Bottas suffered a puncture on the way to to the grid.

“We monitor the pressure in the tyres and on the second lap [to the grid] we could see that it was starting to lose pressure,” said Shovlin.

“We knew that it wasn’t going to get terribly low just on the short distance he had to travel around to the grid so we warned him about the puncture.

“That was useful for him, because if he pushes too hard in a corner, he could get caught out by the lack of grip – and when we got onto the grid, we could actually see the cause, which was some debris that had punctured a hole through the tread in the tyre.

“It’s actually quite hard for it to go all the way through, but it did and it was losing air and obviously that tyre wasn’t available during the race,” concluded Shovlin.

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