This was far worse than the groundhog incident in Canada. No wonder Lewis Hamilton was forced to retire.
Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur has revealed the extent of the damage sustained to Lewis Hamilton’s car following his double-whammy collision on the opening lap of the São Paulo Grand Prix.
Hamilton was eventually forced to retire on lap 37 of the 71-lap race at Interlagos given the damage to his SF-25, notably the floor, after incidents with Williams’ Carlos Sainz at Turn 1 at the start, and then with Alpine‘s Franco Colapinto at the end of lap one.
Climbing up the hill onto the start-finish straight, Hamilton clipped the rear of the Alpine, leading to him losing his front wing, in turn damaging the floor as he travelled over it. He also collected a five-second time penalty for causing a collision.
After serving that punishment on lap 32, Ferrari opted to retire the car five laps later.
“Definitely a race to forget,” said Hamilton. “After making contact on the first lap, the damage we picked up cost us a lot of downforce and made the rear very difficult to manage.
“Despite the team’s attempts to find a way forward, the lack of competitiveness, combined with the penalty, meant we eventually had to retire the car.”
Vasseur has confirmed that Hamilton’s car was “missing 35 to 40 points of downforce”.
To put that into context, when Hamilton ran over a groundhog on lap 13 of the Canadian Grand Prix in June, again damaging the floor, it was later confirmed his car lost 20 points of downforce, equating to around half a second per lap, although he managed to finish sixth.
On this occasion, Vasseur insisted there was no reason to continue.
“We lost a huge amount of downforce,” said Vasseur, speaking to the media, including RacingNews365. “We still don’t know if it was from the crash with Sainz, or when he ended up with the front wing under the floor. Perhaps both.
“If you look at Max [Verstappen], and what he did with decent pace [finishing third after starting from the pit lane], you can come back and can score good points, but two crashes, it’s too much.
“And when you are last and you are missing 35 or 40 points of downforce on the car, I’m not sure that it makes sense to damage the engine, so we served the penalty and we stopped the car.”
