Formula 1 ®

George disqualified from the Belgian Grand Prix for being 1.5 kg under weight. Lucky LCH wins again! Max happy with fourth ahead of Lando Norris.

---

No. 63 was weighed, and it matched the minimum of 798.0 kg, but after the fuel was drained of 2.8 liters, per a letter from Jo Bauer, FIA Formula 1 Technical Delegate to The Stewards, the car weighed 796.5 kg.
The standard for underweight cars is a full disqualification which elevated Russell’s Mercedes teammate to a win.
Hamilton’s car passed weight checks after the race. With this win Hamilton moves to 105 race wins and Russell moves back to two.
Instead of Russell being the second multi-racer winner of the season, his lucky teammate Hamilton is

When Russell still believed he won the race, he gave his teammate credit for controlling the race early as Mercedes proves to be better as the season progresses.
“He really controlled that race, and if circumstances were different, he would have won this race,” Russell said.
The circumstances did change when Russell was reported underweight.
Last October, Hamilton was the last driver stripped of a podium finish at the United States Grand Prix when a floor plank was.2 millimeters too thin after wear from the race.

---

Toto

We have to take our disqualification on the chin. We have clearly made a mistake and need to ensure we learn from it. We will go away, evaluate what happened and understand what went wrong. To lose a 1-2 is frustrating and we can only apologise to George who drove such a strong race. Lewis is of course promoted to P1; he was the fastest guy on the two-stop and is a deserving winner.
Despite the disqualification, there are many positives we can take from this weekend. We had a car that was the benchmark in today’s race across two different strategies. Only a few months ago, that would have been inconceivable. We head into the summer break having won three of the past four races. We will look to come back after shutdown rejuvenated and with the aim of maintaining our positive trajectory.

Lewis

It is of course disappointing for the team to lose the 1-2 but there are lots of positives to take away from today.

The car was feeling good, and we had much better pace than we expected. There were several cars that seemed similar in terms of performance but once we had got ahead, we were able to maintain that position. We committed to the two-stop strategy and covered those directly behind us. George was able to make the one-stop work and, although I got close to him in the final few laps, I was unable to get past in the dirty air.

I feel for George, and you don’t want to win a race through a disqualification, but we have been back in the fight for victories in the past few races. It is incredibly competitive now, so we will need to work hard to battle for wins more consistently. Nevertheless, we can go into the summer break with momentum and positivity.

---

Max

“All in all it was quite a positive day for me, considering we started at P11, and we finished in front of Lando who is my main rival in the Championship. I think we did everything right with the strategy today and I had a good clean start. I was in the DRS train and it was difficult to pass, but I think strategy wise we did everything that we could to the limit. It was tough to make it with two mediums and a hard tyre and we could potentially have taken more position if we started with the hard tyre, but I think we did a good job and maximised our result today. It wasn’t realistic to start P11 and fly to the front, so I am overall happy with our performance.

We are looking forward to the summer break and having a bit of time to relax, but at the same time we are committed to being better and faster and are trying to find solutions as we go into the rest of the season. However, everyone has been doing a great job and will have a well deserved break. We had a great start to the season, our last few races have been a bit more difficult, but we have been pushing to find a solution how to do that. Next race is obviously my home race in Zandvoort. It will be a tough battle and it will be all about tyre management, but it will be great to be in front of my home crowd again.”

---

Checo

“Starting P2 and fighting for the top positions, the race was going well in the first stint and we managed to stay in the pack and had quite an intense fight with Lewis as well, we clipped wheels at the beginning. At some point in the second stint it went wrong with the medium tyre when everyone else was on hard tyres, we just didn’t have any pace and it was hard to push. We need to understand what went wrong as we changed a lot on the car but didn’t have the opportunity to try it on the dry as the conditions were so different from qualifying.

We compromised a lot in the final stint, in the strategy we lost quite a bit of time unfortunately. We managed to set the fastest lap at the end, which was the maximum we could get today and more points in the bag. It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster for me recently, as a Team we need to re-group and take some time during the summer break to understand everything and hopefully we hit the ground running for the second half of the season. I’m looking forward to getting some time with my family over the break and getting back in to a good training routine and just really resetting. There is still a long championship ahead

---

---