Valtteri Bottas’s huge crash in the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix was so costly for Mercedes because it hits the team in multiple ways in Formula 1’s new budget cap era.
Earlier this year Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff revealed the company was scrutinising tiny expenses in a bid to slash its spending and get below the new base-level $145m cost cap enforced for 2021.
Bottas suffered an enormous accident at Imola lat Sunday when Williams driver George Russell lost control trying to pass Bottas on the outside at the end of the start-finish straight and speared left into the Mercedes.
The champion team is faced with a significant repair job that may threaten its development programme, such are the small margins Mercedes is working within economically.
Wolff said “we always feared a total write-off” because Mercedes is “very stretched” under the new financial rules.
“The bill in terms of carbon work and metal work will be very extensive” :: Andrew Shovlin
“This one is not going to be a total write-off but almost and that is not something we really wanted,” said Wolff.
The concern is all this damage will exceed the allocation the team has for part production. Mercedes will have hoped to run parts to their normal end of life or as close as possible.
That is not the case with Bottas’s crash and money spent to repair the car needs to be pulled back from somewhere.
Wolff claimed it will “probably limit upgrades that we’re able to do”. On Sunday evening trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin suggested that was not yet known s the full degree of the “extensive” damage needed to be established.
Shovlin did agree that the key difference with such an accident this year is “we are all cost capped, and this sort of damage isn’t in the plan”.
“Our drivers have been incredibly good getting through seasons without breaking much in recent years and certainly the bill in terms of carbon work and metal work will be very extensive from that,” Shovlin said.
“We will see what we can actually salvage and get the cars back together for Portimao, but it is quite a concern when you have these sorts of incidents.”
Shovlin said that part expenses will run too high with a “series” of large accidents like Bottas’s. His comments suggested Mercedes was not yet at a stage where this would be the sort of big problem that hits its development budget – although Lewis Hamilton also broke a front wing going off at Tosa during the race.
But it will have instant knock-on effects because time and money spent assessing the damage, repairing what’s possible and planning a new course of action will detract from the finite resources Mercedes now has to deploy on development or other work.
Mercedes also needs to work out how to run both cars in the “correct” specification for Portugal, because a lot of Bottas’s power unit is “damaged beyond repair”.
“As much as we like our car, we like Valtteri more and happily he was able to come out of that with not much more than a bruised knee from the impact,” Shovlin elaborated in a Mercedes video published on Wednesday.
“But it was a big crash, we were seeing around 30g at points in his trip around the walls and the track.
“Unfortunately, the car has not done quite so well. There is a fair amount of damage to that.
“We have managed to bring a lot of it back to the UK, we’ve got the power unit at Brixworth where that’s being checked and inspected carefully and we will just pick through this and some of the bits we might be able to salvage.
“Unfortunately, quite a lot of it is damaged beyond repair and we are just looking at a logistics plan to try and be able to get sufficient parts to Portimao to make sure we can run both cars in the correct spec.”
The engine damage will likely have repercussions further down the line. If Bottas must move onto fresh major power unit components he will be doing so well ahead of the planned end of their life cycle.
That means he’d be facing 21 events with just two power units – an impossible task, so he will need to exceed his allocation at some point and that means a grid penalty.
Bottas is already 28 points off the championship lead, with Mercedes grateful it did not lose ground to Red Bull in the constructors’ championship through his point-less Imola weekend because Sergio Perez didn’t score either.
Both Bottas and Mercedes will now expect a further setback later in the year, by which point any wider consequence of the crash on development will also have been established.
