Mercedes explain cause of Lewis Hamilton’s hot F1 seat at Italian GP

Mercedes trackside engineering chief Andrew Shovlin has explained the cause of Lewis Hamilton’s hot seat complaints during the Italian Grand Prix F1 weekend.

During Friday practice, Hamilton was vocal in complaining about how hot the seat was in the cockpit.

Hamilton described the temperature inside his Mercedes car as “ridiculously hot” and likened it to “sitting in a sauna with no shorts on”.

The weekend overall had unusually high temperatures reaching over 30 degrees, contributing to the overheating inside the cockpit.

“The most significant cause was in Monza it was extremely hot,” Shovlin explained on the team’s YouTube channel. “The seat and the car is always running pretty hot and there’s a lot of heat generated by the power unit that you’re trying to dissipate.

“You’ve also got a lot of electronic boxes and those are working quite hard and they generate their own temperature so you’re trying to lose that out of the cockpit.”

Shovlin added that friction between the plank (under the car) and the track will have generated temperature.

“You’ve also got the car down the straights in Monza, there is a few places where the planks hitting the road and that will in itself will generate temperature through friction and that will start to sort of begin to conduct up through the floor of the car and into the driver’s seat,” he added.

“With the ambient temperature at 34, nothing can be below that, you’ve also got numerous heat sources and it just pushes it up so the cockpit starts to get considerably above a driver’s body temperature, it’s then very hard for them to cool down and the heat just builds and builds.

“Now they’re used to driving in these very difficult environments, it’s just that when you get the very hottest races, it’s a bit extreme and it really does test them.”

Mercedes endured a lacklustre weekend at Monza, finishing fifth and seventh respectively.

In a bid to combat high temperatures, Shovlin revealed teams are always looking at ways to “improve the situation for the drivers”.

They do a lot of training, they do a lot of training at temperature, but the fact is once the cockpit’s getting hotter than they are, getting rid of that heat is nigh on impossible,” he explained.

“Now, we are looking at ways at which we can improve the situation for our drivers, within the sport as well they are looking at means that we can apply additional equipment to the car at these exceptional races that will keep the drivers a bit cooler, but as I said it is a very challenging environment and that is why they do so much training.”