On the evening of Sunday, George Russell couldn’t win in the Sakhir GP due to a mix up regarding identical-looking tires. Toto Wolff, boss of, Mercedes team described it as a big mixup. While destroying George Russel’s win, it manufactured Sergio Perez’s first victory in the competition.
The radio call which is used to inform about the new set of tires to be brought into the pit was a matter of miscommunication with the red team. While both the cars pitted in and the crews got a radio call for standby, the blue team received the message while the red team couldn’t.
George Russel Woes During The Pitstop
Andrew Shovlin, the chief engineer explained how the smoking gun interfered with the messages of the radio call and prioritized one message over the other. It was a mishap. There were several broadcasts in the station and the red team missed one key bit of it. They were unplanned pit stops and the communication breakdown was very hard to recover from.
There was a lag in the reaction between the mechanics of the front tire and rear tires.
The pit stop was unplanned and unnecessary but the Mercedes team had to do it because there was a gap and they had to exploit it by changing the tires. Even after George Russel was fifth in the race, he quickly retained second place but a puncture in the tire while being at Turn 10 brought things to a halt for him. Russel would have won if he had the support of softer fresher tires and DRS. If the pit stop wasn’t as messy as this, Russel would have been on track and not gotten a puncture while making positions.
However, Russel will surely have a victory from Mercedes’s cockpit in the near future.
