Extent of Hamilton car damage from Perez clash revealed

Hamilton and Perez collided as they went four wide with the Ferrari pair of Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz on the fast run to Turn 1. 

The seven-time world champion attempted to go around the outside of Perez, who jinked towards Hamilton to avoid the Ferraris, with the pair bouncing into each other and the Mercedes driver forced onto the grass. 

Bits were seen shedding off Hamilton’s W14 during the early stages of the race but Mercedes have since confirmed that his performance “wasn’t significantly affected” on his way to claiming fifth place. 

“Thankfully nothing significant,” Mercedes’ head of strategy Rosie Wait said in the team’s post-race debrief video. 

“He did lose some small bits from his car, but the performance wasn’t significantly affected and crucially the balance of the car. 

“So we didn’t need to adjust the strategy to compensate for that damage. More significant was the fact that both of our cars lost positions at the start after all that contact. 

“We were already on the backfoot having qualified seventh and eighth, and we knew it was going to be a challenging race to get ahead of Ferrari, needing a few things to go our way, and the start certainly didn’t go our way.” 

Mercedes ran alternative strategies with Hamilton favouring the much-fancied two-stop, while George Russell gambled on a one-stop. 

Russell’s decision ultimately failed to pay off as he slipped from second to seventh when he was caught by those on much fresher tyres, including Hamilton and Sainz. 

Asked if Mercedes could have kept both cars ahead of Sainz, Wait said: “Ultimately, we will never know. One of the beauties of sport is that you can never be sure what is going to happen. That's why we love competing in it and people love watching it. 

“Our real challenge that race, was trying to fight Ferrari. We were on the backfoot having qualified behind, had a bad start and our pace was nip and tuck. Realistically even if we could have gotten one car ahead of one Ferrari, that represented a good result for us. We already had that with Lewis having undercut Sainz, so we needed to be careful not to compromise the gains we had already made. 

“In this situation it would be lovely if there was a pause button where you could take a time out, and we could just chat and discuss with the drivers. We could have understood from George how the tyres are feeling and how likely it was to be able to maintain his pace as the race progressed. We could have spoken to both about the options for defending. 

“Overtaking is difficult in Suzuka, but it is no Singapore. Whilst the vast majority of overtakes happen in the DRS zone into turn 1, there is still around 50 percent of overtakes that are just scattered around the rest of the track. I am sure we could have worked together as a team to defend both of their positions into turn 1 but the question is: Would that have put us at risk in the rest of the circuit? 

“Had Sainz been able to overtake Lewis, George would have been a sitting duck. Given what we saw with how easily Piastri and Leclerc were able to get through George, the writing was really on the wall for him, and it was overwhelmingly likely that whatever we tried to do he wasn’t going to be able to defend those positions. 

“Our focus therefore had to shift to making sure that we didn’t compromise the position that we had already gained to Sainz with Lewis. 

“We did give it our best shot with the two cars, but ultimately this is not a circuit where that works, and George was always destined to finish in P7 unfortunately.”