Mercedes have explained why they failed to ensure George Russell served his pit-lane speeding penalty during the Monaco Grand Prix, a mistake that cost him points in the race.
Russell was handed a five-second time penalty for exceeding the pit-lane speed limit when Mercedes first changed his tyres. During the race’s first Safety Car period he then came in for a second stop, but the team did not serve the penalty at that pit visit and he finished the race without the time added to a stop.
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Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ head of trackside engineering, said the error stemmed from an unusually complicated sequence of events. Their second car had just lapped Russell and narrowly missed the chance to pit when the Safety Car was deployed. The team initially planned to pit Andrea Kimi Antonelli but keep Russell out, then altered that call when circumstances changed.
“It was at a very complicated point of the race because Kimi had just overtaken George, so George was a lapped car,” Shovlin said in a video released by Mercedes. “When the Safety Car came out the plan was to bring Kimi in.
“We were doing the calculations for George with his pit stop, with the penalty and the extra fact that he had to wait for Kimi’s car to be serviced, and whether he would still be ahead of Hadjar. We concluded he would not, so we told George to stay out.
“Having missed Kimi’s stop the first time we still had an opportunity the second time around, so we called him in. At that point the message came up that the Safety Car would go through the pit lane.
“So Kimi was being serviced as planned. What we failed to do was get the message to George to stay in the fast lane.”
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Shovlin explained that both sets of tyres were prepared at the garage, which is common during a Safety Car because strategies can change rapidly depending on other teams. Although George had been instructed to remain in the fast lane, when the cars came through the pit lane he saw the tyres and assumed they were for him. With no time to relay the instruction, he pulled into the box.
“Because the mechanics weren’t expecting him, they weren’t ready to serve the penalty. So certainly things there that we can learn from and improve in future.”
After the error, Russell repeatedly asked the team for another pit stop so he could serve the overlooked five-second penalty, but Mercedes chose not to bring him back in.
Russell was one of five drivers penalised for pit-lane speeding, each exceeding the limit by the narrow margin of 0.1 kph. Alpine, whose driver Pierre Gasly received two such penalties, have filed a Right of Review request over the decisions.
Shovlin added that Mercedes are unsure why Russell’s car triggered the pit-lane speeding penalty. Pit-lane speed monitoring uses timing loops around the circuit to measure time between fixed points and calculate average speed. In Monaco, the pit lane includes several bends and drivers naturally try to take the apex to shorten the distance, which can affect those timing calculations.
“We were well aware of that and had already reduced the pit-lane speed limiter setting on the car. We actually told George to stay wide so he wasn’t cutting the corner,” Shovlin said. “So we don’t fully understand why it triggered a pit-lane speeding penalty and we’re aware of a few other teams who had a similar issue where they’re not quite sure why it caused the problem. There are discussions going on at the moment. We need to get to the bottom of that because it was clearly very costly for George’s race.”
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