Mercedes admits the opening-lap incident between Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton at the Spanish Grand Prix could have consequences on the team's performance in Monaco next weekend.
Both drivers collided on the approach of Turn 4 when pole sitter Hamilton, who had been overtaken by Rosberg at the first corner, spun on the grass and slid sideways into his team-mate after the latter closed the door on the inside.
Talking in the latest edition of the Silver Arrows Show on YouTube, Mercedes chief operating officer Rob Thomas explains how the team reacted to launch the rebuild process instantly.
“Fortunately, this sort of incident are very rare for us but when they do happen, we have quite a good process in place to deal with that,” he said. “All of us, when that initial impact happened, we had our head in our hands for probably about 10 seconds. And then we all thought ‘Ok, what next?’
“In this kind of situation, we’re hungry for information so immediately we’d be contacting ourselves in the factory to say ‘You’ve all seen it? What are we going to do?’ and emails will go out almost immediately.
“The first thing we sent out is to the competitive department to pretty much say ‘Next weekend, we’re all in’. We can see from the impact that it’s going to be a lot of damage.
“When the cars are back into the garage at the circuit, a lot of analysis goes on there, lots of phone calls and photographs come back to us.
“Our first policy is to make sure the cars are going to be safe. From the circuit, we get a list where all the parts that are suspect are listed. On that list, this time there were over 1,000 parts. There were 1200 parts listed that came back to us.
“Thousands of parts are getting looked at in about 24 hours. That will then tell us our workload. From that point, it’s either we go to our suppliers and say “we need parts very quickly” or in-house we get fully on it. The planning and organisation is a huge challenge and that’s really where the team excels.”
Given the tight timeframe until the next championship round, Thomas says Mercedes could end up sacrificing performance to ensure optimum safety.
“In Monaco, we test on a Thursday so we’ve got one day less than normal, so we’re going to start building the car this Friday. We’ve got three days to pull all this together to be able to put together two cars to go to Monaco.
“It’s aways doable. It’s all about compromising and making quick decisions. The number one priority is to make sure the cars are safe so we take care of what we call the class A parts, things like the suspension have to be correct.
“After that we look at the performance parts. We know we’ve got a pretty competitive car so everybody is massively motivated to make sure we get these performance car parts together and we go in the best possible condition to the circuit.”
The full Silver Arrows Show can be found below:
Exclusive Stoffel Vandoorne Q&A
FEATURE: Combined Barcelona testing times
Scene at the Spanish Grand Prix
Spanish Grand Prix - Quotes of the weekend
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