Mercedes has shed light on how seriously the floor damage Andrea Kimi Antonelli sustained during the Chinese Grand Prix affected his pace.
He picked up damage on the first lap after the Ferrari drivers made contact.
“What happened was Leclerc had hit Lewis [Hamilton’s] rear tyre and that broke his front wing end plate off,” Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin explained in a video released by the team. “Now, Kimi saw that, but he couldn’t avoid it because there were cars either side of him.
“So he drove over it and that then went under the car and it damaged the floor fences. And that was costing quite a lot of performance.”
Antonelli’s lap times were consistently several tenths of a second slower than those of team mate George Russell during the race. Shovlin said it is difficult to precisely quantify how much of that was down to the damage Antonelli’s car sustained.
“That [would be] a lot easier to say if you had a number of laps before it happened and then you can look at the loss. But here, when it’s on lap one, you’re having to estimate a bit where he would have been.
“To make that estimation, we can look at the aero data and we could see that we lost something of the order of two to three tenths of a second worth of downforce. But then the other problem was it’s not evenly distributed across the car.
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“You’d have heard Kimi come on the radio relatively early on and say to Bono [race engineer Peter Bonnington], ‘I’ve got no rear grip, mate.’ And what he meant there is that more of the downforce was missing from the rear axle.
“That causes the rear tyres to slide, they get hot, they lose grip. And he was battling a bit with that through most of the race. You can tune it a bit at the pit stop, you can make a front wing adjustment. But the problem is it can cause quite inconsistent effects when you’ve got damage on a car.
“It’s not just like having two tenths less performance because in some corners or in some cross-wind conditions, it can be more or less. The balance can be moving around a lot. And he did a good job to deal with that.”
Antonelli finished eighth but was promoted to sixth place after the Ferrari drivers were disqualified. Shovlin believes his damage prevented him from challenging them and Max Verstappen for fourth place.
“It was frustrating because I think from the pace we’d seen with Kimi this weekend, he should have been fighting with Ferraris, with Max. It would have been great to see him up there.
“It’s also great for his learning as an F1 driver to be racing at the front. So a bit of bad luck for Kimi there, but he’s really positive and looking forward to the rest of the season.”
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2025 Chinese Grand Prix
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