Mercedes F1 has avoided sporting penalties for having modified and announced its tire pressures when the wheels were already fitted to the W15s, before the race restarted in Brazil. Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes' chief engineering director, explains in detail why the FIA did not impose a sporting sanction on his team.
“The problem was that when we received the message to restart, there were immediately ten minutes left” Shovlin said. “The tires had to be fitted to the car with five minutes remaining. This meant we only had a few minutes to get the tires to the car, mount them and have them checked by the FIA.”
“It didn't work. In Brazil, the layout of the pit lane is unusual. The garages are high up. You have to get off either by going around the pit entrance road or through a gate located much higher high but with the position of our garage we had to adjust the tire quite far to get to the car.”
And that's why adjustments were made to the cars: “The train we requested, which was not a train on the racks, but a train on skateboards so we could move them, had not been purged to the pressures of racing at that time .”
“The engineers ask for different tire pressures. The tire technicians then run around making sure all the sets of tires are ready. These sets of tires were not finished.”
“Once we got them on the car, we ran into the five minute limit, which is a serious penalty if you don't meet it. We had to put them on the car. So we started putting them on. purge, but we ran out of time.”
The FIA had nothing to say about the pressures themselves: “They were satisfied that the tires were at the correct pressure. It's just that the scrutineer was not there to supervise the bleeding before they got on the car. That's why we were summoned by the sports commissioners.”
The stewards justified not giving a sporting penalty by the fact that the team had been forced to rush the pressure check, as Shovlin confirms: “They recognized that there was no sporting advantage and that we complied with all the regulations regarding tire pressure.”
