Mercedes have admitted that they "got lucky" with the aftermath of George Russell's crash at the Canadian Grand Prix. Russell had been running in fourth place when he hit the wall at the exit of Turn 9, forcing him to limp back to the pits with a damaged car. While he was able to continue in the race after some repairs, the Briton eventually retired from the running on Lap 53. In the team's race debrief video, Chief Technical Officer Mike Elliott has explained the reason behind Russell's DNF, and also acknowledged that the damage to his W14 could have been much worse.
Mercedes 'got lucky' with extent of damage to car
"The DNF itself was actually due to brake wear," Elliott said. "You push the brakes really hard at a circuit like Canada; it's a lot of big stops and we could see in our telemetry data the brake wear on George's car was getting out of control. We could also see that we weren’t going to make the end of the race if we carried on as we were. "We could also see that, [from] where he was in traffic, in the DRS train, having to overtake the cars in front of him, it was almost going to be impossible to manage his brakes and unfortunately, we had to retire the car. "In terms of the real damage done to the car, in ways we got lucky. The damage to the front wing, obviously we could change the wing at the pit stop. The damage to the tyre and the rim, we changed that at the pit stop, and the floor and rear wing were pretty much came unscathed. "However, when you have a shunt of that magnitude it is always going to unsettle the car, it's always going to leave the car not quite balanced as you want it to. George had to deal with that for the rest of the race."
Russell 'drove a great weekend'
Despite the unfortunate ending to Russell's race, Elliott has praised the the 25-year-old's performance throughout the weekend at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. "I think George drove a great weekend, as did Lewis [Hamilton] for that matter," Elliott explained. "If you looked at the difficulty getting through qualifying in the mixed conditions, to end up with both cars in Q3 in decent positions was a great result for the team. Great work from both drivers. "At the start of the race, I think George drove a great stint on the tyres. He was managing his tyres well and we were starting to see the pace coming for him as we were getting towards the end of that stint. "Unfortunately, he just clipped the kerb in Turn 8; that was enough to unsettle the car and for him to lose the rear end and then crash on the exit of Turn 9."
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