Mercedes recognises need to work on pit stops

LONDON: Formula One champion Mercedes has recognised the need to speed up its pit stops as it wages a tight battle with Red Bull, the fastest team in the pit lane.

Although it made the fastest stop of Monday’s race at Imola, changing the wheels on Valtteri Bottas’s car in 2.24sec in a wet pitlane, it has also lost time with costly errors.

Monday was the first time since 2018, 42 races ago, that Mercedes had topped the fastest pit stop list.

‘‘It is fair to say that we’re not the best,’’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin said yesterday.

‘‘We are losing time in the pit stops and it is an area that we have been focusing on for a while now.’’

An issue with one of the wheel guns at Imola slowed seventime world champion Lewis Hamilton, now only a point clear of Red Bull’s race winner Max Verstappen after two rounds.

Verstappen had stopped first, at a circuit with a very long pit lane, while Hamilton stayed out for another lap and took over the lead.

A 4sec stop and having to wait for Antonio Giovinazzi’s Alfa Romeo to go past before the Mercedes could be released, undid Hamilton’s efforts and kept the Dutchman in front.

‘‘For the next stop we actually changed to a different gun and that seemed to resolve that issue,’’ Shovlin said.

‘‘There were some specific instances that affected us in the race in Imola and we will look to work on those but longer term we are still looking at what we can do with the crew, with the equipment trying to find a bit more time in the stops.’’

Red Bull is famously fast in its pit stops, holding the record of 1.82sec set in Brazil in 2019.

Its best effort at Imola was 2.27sec for Verstappen’s car.

In 2020, it produced the fastest pit stop in 15 of 17 races, nine of them under 2sec.

A nearly 11sec pit stop in the opening race in Bahrain in March wrecked Bottas’ race, the Mercedes driver a distant third, and was attributed to human error with a mechanic withdrawing the wheelgun too early.

At the same Sakhir track in December, an agonisingly long stop ruined George Russell’s chances of a victory as a standin for Hamilton and saw Bottas wait 27sec and leave the pits with the same tyres he had come in on.

The team blamed a radio problem for that one.

Mercedes made a dig at itself days later on social media: ‘‘Someone asked us to post the pit stops from Sunday on our Instagram Reels,’’ the team said on Twitter.

‘‘But Reels can only be 30s [seconds]. Sorry.’’ — Reuters