Pirelli Acknowledges Potential in Mercedes F1's Claim

Pirelli supports Mercedes F1’s explanation of tyre loss potentially leading to George Russell’s disqualification.

Speculation mounts on how Mercedes F1 provided George Russell with an underweight car en route to victory in Belgium.

The British driver was “heartbroken” to be disqualified after the FIA weighed and then rechecked the car, finding it underweight by 1.5 kg on another scale at Spa-Francorchamps.

“We clearly made a mistake and will learn from it,” said team principal Toto Wolff, who also apologised to Russell.

“We now need to investigate to understand exactly what happened.”

The initial theory from the team’s head of engineering, Andrew Shovlin, is that Mercedes F1 miscalculated weight loss due to a unique one-stop victory strategy.

“Nobody saw this strategy coming before the race. So it was probably not included in the weight calculations,” confirms Mario Isola, the head of Pirelli.

“In general, and we were talking about this a few days ago, the loss of rubber is around a kilo per tyre. But George went even further. Just an additional 375 grams lost per tyre would put us out of compliance.”

“Every circuit is different, every situation is different, and wear is not linear. It depends on how hard you push and the perfect balance, as you would then wear all four tyres.”

“However, volumetric wear at Spa was not significant because sometimes, you only wear the tyre with the area on the inner shoulder.”

Spa-Francorchamps also presents another factor: drivers do not have the opportunity to pick up rubber marbles during a victory lap. They must go directly to the parc fermé by reversing up the pit lane from the pit exit. This is as much weight that the F1 cars do not recover for free after the finish.

“Given that it weighs 1.5 kilos less, 1.5 kilos over four tyres is feasible if we’re only talking about the recovery of marbles,” confirms Isola.

“If there’s a lot of recovery, then for 1.5 kilos, that would be less than 400 grams on each tyre. That’s a figure that’s possible. But it’s likely that Mercedes had accounted for this in their calculations anyway.”

Another theory is that Mercedes’s unexpected and sudden return to an old floor specification led the team to miscalculate the necessary ballast on Russell’s car.

We will have to wait for the traditional debriefing of the German team on Wednesday or Thursday for more details!