08/07/2018
NEWS STORY
Lance Stroll and Sergey Sirotkin will start today's race from the pitlane after Williams opted to change the rear wing on both cars.
"Following the issues we saw in qualifying we will be making some changes to the cars ahead of the race," revealed Williams this morning. "This will now require both our drivers to start from the pitlane as per the regulations."
The issues referred to are the DRS-related phenomenon which saw both drivers spin out of Q1, leaving Lance Stroll stuck in the gravel and unable to post a time, while teammate Sergey Sirotkin - though able to continue - unable to make it through to Q2 and finishing last of those drivers that posted a time.
"Unfortunately, we had a big problem in qualifying which caused both cars to spin," the team's technical boss Paddy Lowe subsequently revealed.
"We have a phenomenon which we have not seen all year, or indeed ever before, whereby the DRS activation intermittently causes a complete loss of aerodynamic floor loading which does not recover at the entry to the subsequent corner.
"In the case of both spins, the cars entered the corner with no load in the floor which had obvious consequences," he admitted.
"We came to this event with a number of new bodywork items which we evaluated during FP1 and FP2. This new DRS-related phenomenon was seen only once in FP1 on one of the cars but was incorrectly diagnosed to be related to a particular configuration which we chose not to carry forward into FP2 and for qualifying and the race. We must now understand exactly what change in the cars caused this phenomenon which is entirely related to the use of DRS."
As a result the rear wings on both cars were changed for the old versions, together with the engine cover, cooling panels and front wing/nose assemblies.
The rules dictate that any change of specification means the car has to start from the pitlane, which means Stroll and Sirotkin will join Brendon Hartley in the pitlane, the kiwi not participating in qualifying following his heavy crash in FP3.
Check out our Sunday gallery from Silverstone, here.