Mercedes details extent of massive repair jobs in Austria

The Mercedes team has revealed the massive efforts it deployed in Austria to put together a pair of W13 silver arrows after Lewis Hamilton and George Russell's qualifying crashes.

Both Mercedes drivers were caught out in the Friday afternoon session at the Red Bull Ring, and while damage appeared limited from the outside, the Brackley squad knew that it had a big challenge on its hands once it assessed its cars' wounds.

Not only were Mercedes' crews time-constrained, they were also facing a spare parts problem that required some creative thinking and a few compromises as technical director Mike Elliott explained in the team's post-race debrief on YouTube.

• Read also: Hamilton says Mercedes 'slowly getting there' after Austrian GP podium

"When you crash two cars it’s always going to make for a very difficult weekend from then onwards," Elliott explained.

"We’ve done quite a lot of damage to the cars so, we’ve broken both floors, we’ve broken both rear wings, we damaged quite a lot of suspension, on Lewis’s car we also damaged the front wing and done some cosmetic damage to the chassis.

"So, damage that we can repair but not repair over a weekend. That meant completely rebuilding Lewis’s car from scratch."

As the team organised its rebuild plan, it realised it could only rely on one spare floor, which implied some crafty manufacturing to put together a second floor from the best parts of its two damaged elements.

"It meant also trying to build one floor out of two," Elliott said. "We had one complete spare we could fit and we had to get the best out of the two crashed floors to build another.

"And it also meant we were compromised on George’s rear wing because we only had one complete spare rear wing that we chose to fit to Lewis’s car because he was going to have to come through the field, which meant that George had to fit a rear wing which was probably not the ideal level of downforce, it was a bit too much downforce for that circuit.

"Having rebuilt the cars we also had to dial in the setup again and you’ve got very limited time in FP2 to do that and that was always going to be another compromise.

"And then finally having damaged two cars as badly as we did on Friday, the drivers are now in a position where if we damage them in the sprint race we may well be in a position where we couldn’t race on Sunday.

"So, all of that has to be factored in and all of that sort of compromises your weekend."

Fortunately, Russell and Hamilton enjoyed a drama-free sprint race which they finished respectively fourth and eighth.

On Sunday, Hamilton secured his third consecutive podium while Russell clocked in just behind his teammate in P4.

It was a satisfactory end to a dramatic weekend for the reigning world champions.

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