Autobayng News Team
Andrea Kimi Antonelli was not to blame for the tiny car movement which triggered his jump start penalty at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, say Mercedes.
The stewards handed Antonelli a five-second time penalty after his car crept forward fractionally before the start. Mercedes’ data indicated the car moved by just 20 millimetres.
The team’s head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin said Antonelli did not move the clutch to trigger this movement.
“When people talk about a ‘jump start’ they’re normally thinking the drivers drop the clutch before the lights have gone out to get a bit of a run on the competition,” he said in a video produced by the team. “This was quite different and quite unusual.
If you watch the video what you see is before the lights go out the car rolls about two centimetres forward very, very slowly. But Kimi doesn’t drop the clutch, he’s actually got the clutch fully pulled.
“We think what happened is at that point the car started to roll was the point he took his foot off the brakes. So, as they get ready for the start, they remove their foot and that’s only a second or so before the lights actually go out.
“Whether it’s the vibration of the car, or there might have been some torque in the driveline, it certainly wasn’t Kimi and the clutch that made it creep forward.”
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Antonelli followed the correct procedure for the start, said Shovlin. “The FIA systems are very sensitive. They can pick up on that small amount of motion and when we eventually checked the video with time to look at it properly you could see this very, very subtle movement.
“So it was unfortunate for him to pick up that penalty. He was doing everything correctly in terms of what we tell him to do but we just need to work out how to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
Despite starting 17th and receiving a penalty, Antonelli recovered to take third place after running almost the entire race on a single set of hard tyres. Shovlin said the team always intended to pit him early before taking advantage of the Virtual Safety Car period on lap two.
“We were pretty much committed to coming in very early. Whether it was lap one, two, three, it was certainly going to be in the first few laps because we wanted to actually stop onto the hard tyre before anyone else could cover us.
“If you wait to a more sensible lap, lap 10 or 15, you’ll find other people are covering you off and you’re stuck in traffic. But we knew that Kimi had very good pace.
“The strategy was all around ‘how do you give him the maximum amount of clear air?’ and the best way to achieve that was to stop when no one else was going to stop. Because we knew it would be early, we thought ‘let’s go on the soft tyre’ because that would be the easiest for warm-up. It would give him the most grip off the start.
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“It wasn’t so much about gaining positions, it’s just safer on the soft tyre. The more grip you’ve got, if you’re going forward slightly against the cars around you, it’s easier for the driver and we felt that that was what would give him the best chance of coming ’round and allowing us to take that stop.
“As you saw, we kept him out until the VSC, which meant that he could do that stop even quicker and lose less race time.”
Shovlin said Antonelli did a “great job” to stretch his hard tyre out for 48 laps, avoiding the need for a second pit stop. At the end of the race he was able to pull away from Oscar Piastri and Charles Leclerc behind him.
“He drove it very well,” said Shovlin. “He’s got a good feel for what the tyres can handle.
“He knew that the fronts were having a difficult time, but the rears were in good shape and he was able to use the throttle a bit to turn the car and give the fronts an easier time.
“But when we decided on that strategy, we didn’t know the hard was going to get all the way to the finish. No one would know that because you didn’t have enough data from Friday. So it was either going to be two [sets of] hard tyres from the first stop or one. We were just basing it on the lap times.
“When we kept seeing him doing green times, why come in? And then, by the time he got himself into a position where he was fourth on the road, it was then a case of let’s see if we can hold them up. So he did a brilliant job to defend to Piastri, who’s obviously in a very, very quick car and Leclerc not far behind.”
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