George Russell
It’s always difficult making the right calls in conditions like today but sadly, we didn’t manage to do that. We opted to go to the Hard tyre after the formation lap and we then had a 25-minute window of dry weather, which should have enabled us to put them to good use. Unfortunately, we had 15-minutes of Virtual Safety Car running. Once we were running, we were seconds a lap quicker than others but just had too much time to make up.
We were then a few laps too early pitting back to the slick tyre after the track had dried once again. We put on the Hard tyre and suffered with warm-up issues. I spun and lost ground; we were fortunate to be able to fight back to P10 but overall, that was a bad day and not how I wanted my home race to go. We will look to learn from this and ensure we come back stronger before the summer break.
Kimi Antonelli
That was a tough day. I wasn’t sure about stopping for the Hard tyre in the opening laps, but we made the call. Sadly, the Virtual Safety Car came out shortly afterwards and I couldn’t build any temperature in the tyre. I struggled once we were back underway to generate the necessary heat and that left me unable to utilise any pace advantage we may have had as the track dried.
Once the rain hit, the conditions became treacherous. Even once the Safety Car had come back in, visibility was still very poor and there was lots of standing water. That is what caught out Hadjar and that was just unfortunate for the both of us. I tried to continue but the diffuser damage I suffered was too much and we had to retire the car. A weekend to forget then but we will look to come back stronger in Spa.
Toto Wolff, CEO & Team Principal
We are all in this together and that was a poor performance all around from us today. We made successive decisions which weren’t right, and we will be evaluating what we did, when, and why, to ensure we improve from this. We have to take this result on the chin but must make sure we do not repeat the errors we made today.
The first call to take the slick tyre on the formation lap was wrong. From there, we spiralled from bad to worse. We didn’t opt to split strategies and, if we had, Kimi’s race may have been different. He was unfortunate to suffer race ending damage after the Safety Car but he shouldn’t have been back in the pack and at risk of that. We didn’t fit the right dry tyre at either stop, opting for the Hard compound which suffered a challenging warm-up. All in all, that was a tough day and we need to bounce back in the final two races before the summer break.
Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director
This was a very disappointing day for the team and a difficult end to a tough double-header. After starting P4 and P10, scoring a solitary point is significantly below our own expectations. George's race was shaped by the decision to take the dry tyre on the formation lap - it was a bit of a gamble, in hindsight a mistake, and it left us on the back foot for the rest of the race.
George drove strongly to recover ground on the first two stints, but when it came to the final stop, we aimed to leapfrog Gasly by stopping for dry tyres. We overestimated how ready the circuit was for them, however. George lost a lot of time as a result, including a spin through Becketts, and was only able to salvage a single point at the flag.
As for Kimi, we mirrored George's call for dry tyres after two laps, sacrificing track position as a result, and he was then blameless in the collision with Hadjar in the spray. This caused significant damage to the diffuser, and we took the decision to retire the car consequently. There is much for us to analyse and learn from today, and it is imperative that we do that work, regroup and deliver a much stronger weekend in three weeks' time in Spa.
Noah Strømsted, Mercedes Junior – FIA F3
We had a very difficult race today with half of the grid starting on slicks and the other half on wets. Ultimately, we made the wrong decision today to start on the slicks, and we will learn from that. I had suspension damage from some contact in the early laps which also made the car difficult to drive. Sadly, the slicks just wouldn’t work in the damp conditions, and we weren’t able to make up any ground. Our next race is at Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium. I have had good success there in the past so I will be pushing to score some strong results and gain points in the championship.
