Mercedes reveal substantial George Russell pace drop after Max Verstappen incident

Red Bull driver Max Verstappen speaks to George Russell.

Mercedes explained how contact with Max Verstappen left George Russell losing 0.8 seconds a lap in his opening Monza stint.

Russell had an eventful first lap of the Italian Grand Prix at the wheel of the Mercedes W15. Launching from P3, he found himself taking to the escape road at the opening chicane, while also picking up front wing damage on that opening tour of Monza.

Max Verstappen contact cause of George Russell’s broken Mercedes front wing

Russell continued with the damage until pitting on Lap 12, Mercedes explaining that was due to safety concerns, though that ailing front wing was not helping performance either, with Russell missing 0.8s a lap.

“It certainly had a big affect on the performance of the car,” Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin confirmed in the team’s Italian GP debrief.

“How we measure that is very similar to the way that we assess the performance of an update kit. We’re comparing the loads, the pressures that we’re seeing on the car, and we’re referencing those to what we think it should generate in those conditions.

“After that contact, we’d see a significant drop. What would that equate to? Were it pure downforce, it would be about four tenths of a second. However, when you lose it all off the front, the driver can’t get round corners, you’ve got big, long turns there like Parabolica, and you’re understeering. You could probably double that, more like eight tenths of a second was what he was losing in that early stint.

“Now you’ve then got the question do you bring it in? Do we change the wing? We can have that conversation based on performance, but in the end it was just based on the safety of George, the other drivers on track.

“We could see that the wing was starting to deteriorate further and at that point we decided to stop for an early stop, go to the hard tyre, fit the spare front wing, and carry on from there, but that really damaged his whole race, from there it was almost impossible to recover.”

As for how Russell suffered that damaged front wing, Shovlin confirmed that the Brit had tangled with Verstappen’s Red Bull at the second chicane, though it was very much a “racing incident”.

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“We know how it occurred because we’ve got the onboard cameras that we can look at,” said Shovlin.

“The issue for George sort of goes all the way back to Turn 1 where he was coming down into Turn 1, Oscar [Piastri] had come across him. That will inherently lose a lot of downforce, he then was caught out by how early Oscar had braked, that meant that George had to take to the escape road, and then when he came out he’d lost position.

“So then going into the second chicane, he’s got Max and Sergio [Perez] on his right-hand side, and the damage occurred where he’d just got his nose close to Max’s rear wheel, that made contact, that was what broke the front wing.

“But really that was a racing incident, that really went all the way back to Turn 1 where because of those positions lost other cars coming by and attacking, he got into that scrap.”

Russell would cross the finish line P7 at Monza, a position and just under two seconds behind Verstappen.

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