18/11/2021
NEWS STORY
Mercedes technical director, Mike Elliot reveals why Lewis Hamilton's rear wing was in breach of the regulations in Brazil, and it is not clear cut.
"The simple answer is we failed a test that we needed to pass," admits Elliott in the post-Brazil debrief from the German team.
"It's actually a bit more nuanced than that," he adds. "Within the regulations there are two things, there are the technical regulations, which are the rules that we need to pass, and then there are technical directives, and they are issued by the FIA, and in general explanations as to how they are going to police those regulations.
"In this case, you've got the main plane of the rear wing and you've got a flap," he continues. "And there is a rule that states there is a minimum gap between those wings and a maximum gap when the DRS opens, and that maximum gap is 85mm.
"That is written in those regulations and that is something we actually passed," he confirms. "The wing wasn't more than 85, or the flap wasn't more than 85mm away from the trailing edge. The reality was that we didn't pass the technical directive.
"Within the technical directives, they specify how that measurement is going to be taken," he explains. "What they say is that we need to pass a test where they push a cylinder of 85mm diameter into that gap and they need to be able to push that through with a minimum force of 10 newtons.
"The reality is that, while we passed that over the majority of the span, there was a small place where we didn't pass that test," he admits. "Now, just to put that into perspective, we obviously try to make sure that our cars are legal at all times.
"We don't want to take these sorts of penalties. What we do is we test those wings in test and development, and in those tests we do exactly the same tests, but we do it with a much higher force, 30 newtons, and we pass.
"We also test those wings when we get to the track, so on a Wednesday morning or a Thursday morning, we go through all those suites of tests and again that wing passed."
The wing in question was impounded by the FIA and is still in its possession - Toto Wolff declaring that the sport's governing body can keep it and "cut it into a thousand pieces".
However, this means that Mercedes is unable to carry out its own investigation.
"For some reason, we are yet to understand," says Elliott. "We had some sort of reliability issue, whether that was damage on track, whether that was something coming loose, we have yet to find that out because that wing is being bagged up and sort of FIA sealed."
Check out our Thursday gallery from Qatar, here.